I know it means nothing to most of you but to me, a god knows I exist! This would be the 1981 Nobel Prize in chemistry guy. He referenced a paper I wrote! I’m less insignificant!
Good job! and congratulations! Your significance is now an established fact! 
Very cool! I was delighted when I discovered I paper I wrote was used as part of course material for a summer course, but I didn’t think to check the name of the prof. I don’t think he was Nobel-quality, though.
No no no. I’m not significant. Just less insignificant. I’m really small potatoes(sp?) in my world.
Thanks for the acknowedgment though it feels really good that a Nobel Prize winner read something I wrote.
Wow, you beat me by 50 levels. I just teach HS chem, and no one will ever read a paper I write, because I won’t write one. I hope that some student of mine will actually become a reputable scientist, though. Teach long enough, and the odds get pretty good.
Hooray for Christopher, whose star tonight shines brightly.
And also for Cardinal, who chose to be the nebula wherein new stars will be born.
And also for all those who burn less brightly, but more persistently, to illuminate our smaller, everyday spheres.
Congratulations, and thanks.
I had him for freshman chemistry. Weird guy.
Go Big Red!
Alas, all I can say is I saw him across the dining hall once.
That is so freaking awesome. basks in your radiance
Pretty cool! Enjoy your time in the sun!
That kicks ass! Congratulations! When I took chemistry in high school, we watched a documentary series called “World of Chemistry” that he emceed. Highly regarded expertise duly noted, but the man’s quite a showman. “People know of me as the man who likes to carry MOLECULES around in his backpack,” he said as he took out several ball and stick models of basic organic functional groups to explain to the viewer. 
Is he still at Cornell? Where do you work?
Yes, he is still at Cornell. I work at the University of Oregon (for the next few months.)
I said he’s weird because I got the feeling that he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be anything other than a chemist.
Hell of a scientist, but not the best lecturer.
I had him for chemistry at Cornell too. What I remember most is that he assigned us to read Primo Levi’s ‘The Periodic Table’. How cool is that – a book of short stories in a freshman chemistry class! If I recall he is a bit of a writer himself – poetry IIRC?
Yeah, poetry, and he and Carl Djerassi wrote a play together called Oxygen, about the discovery of oxygen and which scientist should get credit – the guy who found it but didn’t publish it in time, the guy who also found it separately and did publish it, or the guy who really understood what oxygen could do. As a nerdy chemist myself, I say… it wasn’t very good.
Still, I’ve read boatloads of his papers and they’re almost always rock solid. The way he can take a molecule apart in his mind, draw the molecular orbitals, and then say, “See? That right there is why this molecule does what it does” is beyond astounding.
I was originally going to pop in here and beam “I met him!” but that was before I realized that certainly some Cornell alumni could one-up me without breaking a sweat…
+1! ::hitches ride on eloquently-written congrats post::