Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Lucasian Litotes

Well, it wasn't a woman (Gee! I'm shocked), although it could have been but the committee wimped out. And it won't be long. At 63, Mike Green is the oldest appointment yet, and if the retirement rules are applied consistently (which they haven't always been), he only gets four years in the prestigious Chair once held by such luminaries as Newton (at 26) and Dirac (at 30). Conventional wisdom has it that theoreticians are past their "sell-by" date in their late twenties, but Newton didn't write The Principia until his mid forties and Hawking is still publishing in his sixties.

The comparison with Hawking will be inevitable. At least Hawking was only 37 when he was appointed, so he certainly had time to really put theoretical cosmology back on the map; which has done in spades. String theory, by comparison, is in its third or fourth incarnation—depending on how you count—and yet to produce any real physics. Given that both Davis and Green are String theorists (and who isn't these days?) of the same vintage, the breakthrough move, in my opinion, would've been to appoint Davis. But committees, especially academic committees, are not known for their boldness. Without wishing to be unkind, it's a strain to see Green's appointment as anything but a placeholder.

Anyway, the stats now look like this:

Appt Name Born Died
1 1664 Isaac Barrow 1630 1677
2 1669 Sir Isaac Newton 1643 1727
3 1702 William Whiston 1667 1752
4 1711 Nicholas Saunderson 1682 1739
5 1739 John Colson 1680 1760
6 1760 Edward Waring 1736 1798
7 1798 Isaac Milner 1750 1820
8 1820 Robert Woodhouse 1773 1827
9 1822 Thomas Turton 1780 1864
10 1826 Sir George Biddell Airy 1801 1892
11 1828 Charles Babbage 1791 1871
12 1839 Joshua King 1798 1857
13 1849 Sir George Stokes 1819 1903
14 1903 Sir Joseph Larmor 1857 1942
15 1932 Paul Dirac 1902 1984
16 1969 Sir James Lighthill 1924 1998
17 1979 Stephen Hawking 1942 NAN
18 2009 Michael Green 1946 NAN

> apage
[1] 34 26 35 29 59 24 48 47 42 25 37 41 30 46 30 45 37 63
> summary(apage)
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
24.00 30.00 37.00 38.78 45.75 63.00
> lpdata$Name[which.max(apage)]
[1] Michael Green

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