# Celebrities with other remarkable achievements **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [July 30, 2011, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863 "2011-07-30T21:44:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Pazu](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pazu/32/15522_2.png) [@Pazu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pazu)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2011, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/61 "2011-08-01T23:14:54Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > I don’t believe Ms. McKellar has actually done work in mathematics beyond her undergraduate degree, and since then she’s mostly acted, so it’s not really accurate to call her a “mathematician.” > > She is largely famous in that regard not for her work in mathematics, but for writing books aimed at young girls to encourage them to not be intimidated by mathematics, which is a noble pursuit indeed. Well, she does have [a theorem named after her (in part)](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2007/08/20/math-doesnt-suck-and-the-chayes-mckellar-winn-theorem/), based on work she did as an undergraduate, so I give her a lot of credit for that. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Peyote\_Coyote](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/5f8ce5/32.png) [@The\_Peyote\_Coyote](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Peyote_Coyote)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2011, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/62 "2011-08-01T23:25:28Z")
Ted Williams was a Hall of Fame baseball player who compiled excellent combat records in both WW2 and the Korean War ---
**Author:** ![Jeff\_Lichtman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jeff_lichtman/32/1531_2.png) [@Jeff\_Lichtman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jeff_Lichtman)\ **Post date:** [August 1, 2011, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/63 "2011-08-01T23:54:53Z")
> [@The\_Peyote\_Coyote](#): > > Ted Williams was a Hall of Fame baseball player who compiled excellent combat records in both WW2 and the Korean War He also became one of the world’s leading experts on fly fishing. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2011, 2:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/64 "2011-08-02T02:16:36Z")
Hey, Omar Sharif fills the bill. Left acting pretty much to become a top bridge expert. I don’t know to what extent his fame helped, I’m sure it opened doors, but as I understand it, bridge can be a very complex game at the top levels of play. (No mention will be made of Mickey Roarke’s boxing career.) ---
**Author:** ![Eve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Eve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eve)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2011, 2:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/65 "2011-08-02T02:16:51Z")
Silent movie actress and Ziegfeld Girl **Justine Johnstone** later became a pathologist and part of the team that developed the modern intravenous drip technique. (I have always been suspicious of the **Hedy Lamarr** story, by the way, as she never before or after showed any signs of scientific interest–my theory is that the real inventor thought it would be super-cool to have a movie star’s name on his patent). ---
**Author:** ![Namkcalb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c89c15/32.png) [@Namkcalb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Namkcalb)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2011, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/66 "2011-08-02T02:35:49Z")
I forgot one. The highly trained and experinced teacher to special needs kids, Ron Jeremy used to have a mammoth film career. ---
**Author:** ![Biggirl](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biggirl/32/3294_2.png) [@Biggirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biggirl)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2011, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/67 "2011-08-02T04:08:04Z")
Holy crap! It’s **Eve**! ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2011, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/68 "2011-08-02T04:43:14Z")
> [@Eve](#): > > (I have always been suspicious of the **Hedy Lamarr** story, by the way, as she never before or after showed any signs of scientific interest–my theory is that the real inventor thought it would be super-cool to have a movie star’s name on his patent). I always had the same suspicions, but reading about the invention it sounds more the guy who invented the actual device (for a completely different use) may have gotten the idea for submitting the idea as a cryptography device by Lamarr, and in return she got co-inventing credit. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2011, 7:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/69 "2011-08-02T07:55:03Z")
While the story of Hedy Lamarr inventing frequency hopping (which is an early form of a more general technique called spread spectrum) is true, it’s usually told in such a way to make her contribution sound more interesting and more unique than is really the case. First, here’s a description of her life: > **[Hedy Lamarr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr)** > > Hedy Lamarr (/ˈhɛdi/; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914\[a\] – January 19, 2000) was an Austro-Hungarian-born American actress and inventor. She was a film star during Hollywood's Golden Age. > After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her first husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered he... And here’s a description of frequency hopping: > **[Frequency-hopping spread spectrum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_hopping)** > > Frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) is a method of transmitting radio signals by rapidly changing the carrier frequency among many frequencies occupying a large spectral band. The changes are controlled by a code known to both transmitter and receiver. FHSS is used to avoid interference, to prevent eavesdropping, and to enable code-division multiple access (CDMA) communications. > The frequency band is divided into smaller sub-bands. Signals rapidly change ("hop") their carrier frequencies ... There’s no doubt that she was extremely intelligent, but she had no particular education in anything that is relevant to frequency hopping. Through her first husband, a arms manufacturer in Germany in the 1930’s, she was told about a problem that designers of torpedoes had. They wanted the ship that launched the torpedo is be able to communicate with it so that if the target tried to evade the torpedo, the ship could signal it by radio to change its course so that it could still hit the target. The problem was that the target could jam the frequency that the ship used to communicate with the torpedo. A decade later, while Hedy was acting in Hollywood (and married to her second husband), she was talking to the composer George Antheil. Antheil composed both film scores and avant garde music. Some of his avant garde music used multiple player pianos designed to automatically play parts of the musical piece. Antheil was playing for her on a ordinary piano a song where the notes jumped around a lot. She commented that if it was possible for a radio to jump around in frequency in the same way, it would be useful to communicate from ship to torpedo this way since it would make it difficult to jam a transmission, because it would be necessary to jam all of the frequencies. This was her entire contribution to the technology of frequency hopping. Antheil then designed a machine that used player piano rolls to control the frequency a radio used so that the transmissions would jump around between 88 different frequencies (88 because that was the number of piano notes). Lamarr and Antheil got a patent for this idea. The notion of mechanically controlling the change of frequency was simply unworkable at the time though. After the patent had expired, other researchers independently rediscovered the idea. They were able to electronically control the change of frequency, which was workable, and it soon became a common idea in radio transmission. Later it was generalized into the even more common idea of spread spectrum. Frequency hopping was actually discovered independently by various people, both before Lamarr and Antheil and after them. So it’s not as if the idea was something that only Lamarr could come up with. She was also not responsible for the generalization of the idea into spread spectrum. Still, she did come with one great idea. ---
**Author:** ![TreacherousCretin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/treacherouscretin/32/476_2.png) [@TreacherousCretin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TreacherousCretin)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2011, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/70 "2011-08-02T16:25:11Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > While the story of Hedy Lamarr inventing frequency hopping (which is an early form of a more general technique called spread spectrum) is true, it’s usually told in such a way to make her contribution sound more interesting and more unique than is really the case. First, here’s a description of her life: > > [Hedy Lamarr - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr) > > And here’s a description of frequency hopping: > > [Frequency-hopping spread spectrum - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_hopping) > > There’s no doubt that she was extremely intelligent, but she had no particular education in anything that is relevant to frequency hopping. Through her first husband, a arms manufacturer in Germany in the 1930’s, she was told about a problem that designers of torpedoes had. They wanted the ship that launched the torpedo is be able to communicate with it so that if the target tried to evade the torpedo, the ship could signal it by radio to change its course so that it could still hit the target. The problem was that the target could jam the frequency that the ship used to communicate with the torpedo. > > A decade later, while Hedy was acting in Hollywood (and married to her second husband), she was talking to the composer George Antheil. Antheil composed both film scores and avant garde music. Some of his avant garde music used multiple player pianos designed to automatically play parts of the musical piece. Antheil was playing for her on a ordinary piano a song where the notes jumped around a lot. She commented that if it was possible for a radio to jump around in frequency in the same way, it would be useful to communicate from ship to torpedo this way since it would make it difficult to jam a transmission, because it would be necessary to jam all of the frequencies. This was her entire contribution to the technology of frequency hopping. > > Antheil then designed a machine that used player piano rolls to control the frequency a radio used so that the transmissions would jump around between 88 different frequencies (88 because that was the number of piano notes). Lamarr and Antheil got a patent for this idea. The notion of mechanically controlling the change of frequency was simply unworkable at the time though. After the patent had expired, other researchers independently rediscovered the idea. They were able to electronically control the change of frequency, which was workable, and it soon became a common idea in radio transmission. Later it was generalized into the even more common idea of spread spectrum. > > Frequency hopping was actually discovered independently by various people, both before Lamarr and Antheil and after them. So it’s not as if the idea was something that only Lamarr could come up with. She was also not responsible for the generalization of the idea into spread spectrum. Still, she did come with one great idea. Thanks for posting this. Very interesting. .. ---
**Author:** ![Satchmo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/satchmo/32/4223_2.png) [@Satchmo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Satchmo)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2011, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/71 "2011-08-02T17:21:10Z")
> [@Biggirl](#): > > Holy crap! It’s **Eve**! Get with the program! She’s been back almost two days now. 😉 We were all very surprised and pleased to hear from **Eve** again. Careful, don’t scare her away. Maybe she’ll post some more. ---
**Author:** ![bup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/6bbea6/32.png) [@bup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bup)\ **Post date:** [August 2, 2011, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/72 "2011-08-02T17:37:45Z")
\*\*O.J. Simpson \*\*wrote a book about crime. ---
**Author:** ![pesch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pesch/32/4925_2.png) [@pesch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pesch)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2011, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/73 "2011-08-04T03:42:11Z")
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. served notably during World War II by helping create a commando program (inspired by a similar British program). He not only helped form the program, he went on raids along the Italian coast, attacking shipping, capturing German soldiers and destroying radar units. Sometimes, he was accompanied by a war correspondent who repeatedly bent the rules by carrying a weapon along, which opened him to execution if he was captured. But John Steinbeck was willing to take the risk. ---
**Author:** ![Levolor\_the\_Blind](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/bc8723/32.png) [@Levolor\_the\_Blind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Levolor_the_Blind)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2011, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/74 "2011-08-04T04:17:03Z")
**Carlo Pedersoli** , aka **Bud Spencer** , was an Olympic Swimmer, earned a law degree, and learned to pilot jets and helicopters. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2011, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/75 "2011-08-04T18:14:57Z")
This one is a tad weak, but I think it counts: Maynard James Keenan has largely given up loud-musical-group front-manning (e.g., Tool) for supposedly [fine-winemaking](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maynard_James_Keenan). Okay, so winemaking isn’t rocket science; and, his rock music money, and perhaps to some degree his fame, helped him to break into the business. But he is serious about it, seriously involved, and the wines are good (I’ve tried 'em). ---
**Author:** ![PoorYorick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@PoorYorick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PoorYorick)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2011, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/76 "2011-08-04T18:31:26Z")
Not really famous, but [Tommy Casanova](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Casanova) (what a great name) played as safety for the Cincinnati Bengals from 1972 to 1977, and was selected for the Pro Bowl for four of those years. What makes him exceptional, though, was that he attended medical school \*while \*playing professional football! He retired in 1977 to pursue his degree full time is now a respected oculoplastic surgeon. Man, what a great line to pick up chicks in a bar, “Yeah, I’m a pro football player. And a med student.” ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Excellent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f19dbf/32.png) [@Mr.Excellent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Excellent)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2011, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/77 "2011-08-04T18:46:33Z")
> [@Biggirl](#): > > Holy crap! It’s **Eve**! I think this should be a new Dope meme - the obligatory response whenever **Eve** posts. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![salinqmind](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/3ec8ea/32.png) [@salinqmind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/salinqmind)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2011, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/78 "2011-08-05T02:44:39Z")
In addition to Bear Grylls’ ridiculously long list of adventursome achievements, he has a degree in, of all things, Hispanic Studies. And has been appointed Chief Scout of the U.K. (I imagine similar to somebody being appointed Head of the Boy and/or Girl Scouts here). ---
**Author:** ![adhemar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3da27b/32.png) [@adhemar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adhemar)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2011, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/79 "2011-08-05T03:23:58Z")
> [@Evil\_Captor](#): > > could be an “Elvis” style black belt in karate equivalent if you know what I mean Can you explain this further? Are you saying that his black belt was not earned or that that the style was lacking or what exactly? I am not personally a big Elvis fan but I know the instructor Elvis studied under and I know people who studied Tae kwan do with Elvis. PaSaRyu Korean style under Master Kang Rhee is very much a real style fo Tae kwan do and from what I heard from people who were training in Memphis with and at the same time with Elvis, he legitmatly earned his black belt. I trained with the same instructor although many years later so I will admit I have bias in this matter. You of course have the right to believe whatever you would like but I would like to know what you are basing this belief on. Ms Firebird purple belt PaSaRyu Ta Kwon do ---
**Author:** ![Max\_the\_Immortal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6de8d8/32.png) [@Max\_the\_Immortal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_the_Immortal)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2011, 3:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863/80 "2011-08-05T03:24:48Z")
> [@pravnik](#): > > James Franco. From wikipedia:\ See, that just tells me that arts majors have a really light workload. _Ducks and runs_ [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/celebrities-with-other-remarkable-achievements/590863.md?page=5)