Physicists honored on US currency and coinage

Last year, I blogged about physicists, astronomers, mathematicians, and aerospace scientists and inventors honored on US postage stamps.  Today I'd like to tackle the even rarer phenomenon of physicists depicted on US currency and coinage.

Not surprisingly the list is very short.  Obviously, again Benjamin Franklin heads the list, as depicted on the $100 bill.  He is now joined by Dr. Sally Ride on a new American Women Quarter, issued this year.

If we expand our focus, as we did for the postage stamps, to include aerospace inventors, the Wright Brothers are depicted on the North Carolina  state quarter (2001), and their Flyer is also depicted on the Ohio state quarter (2002).  

Aside from these, I know of no other scientists, mathematicians, or engineers depicted on US currency and coinage, unless you count the polymath Thomas Jefferson.  Are there any that I missed?

Norton Critical Editions in natural science

Continuing a slight diversion that began with my November 2021 post on the Cambridge Companions series, let's consider independent publisher W. W. Norton's series of Critical Editions.   The Norton Critical Editions are annotated editions of classic works, mostly of literature, along with editorial apparatus including context and commentary.  Until recently I owned only one NCE, of Machiavelli's The Prince, and was not aware that any books in the series covered natural science.  I recently became aware that there are at least three NCEs on natural science:  two on biology, and one on physics and mathematics.  One is an NCE of James Watson's The Double Helix, edited by Gunther Stent (1980), and the other two are anthologies of selected writings of Isaac Newton (ed. by I. B. Cohen and R. S. Westfall, 1995) and Charles Darwin (ed. by P. Appleman, 1970; 3d edition, 2001).  If that is a complete list of NCEs in natural science, then it has been over 20 years since the last one was revised, while no others have been issued.

These books seem to be intended for use in humanities courses.  The volume on Newton, which I recently acquired, does have some technical material, but is not dominated by it.  And perhaps this explains why there are no other NCEs for physicists.  Too bad!

The 2022 Nobel Laureates in Science

The first week of October has been an exciting one, as usual, with the announcements of the Nobel Prizes, especially those in science.  DTLR readers know that I have a particular interest in connections between Nobel Laureates and fluid mechanics research, even though the prizes have rarely been awarded for work in classical hydrodynamics.  This year is no different, but at least two of the science laureates have familial connections to hydrodynamicists!

One of this year's physics laureates, John F. Clauser, stated in an oral history interview conducted 20 years ago with Joan Bromberg, that his father was a grad student of Theodore Von Karman's, and later became chair of the aeronautics department at Johns Hopkins.  Clauser states that "But all along the way, he always was trying to understand physics, and there were very strong similarities between the mathematics of fluid flow and the mathematics of quantum mechanics, and he didn't understand quantum mechanics. And he kind of pre-programmed me as the guy who might help try to solve the problem that he couldn't solve."  This appears in the very first paragraph of the transcript!  Further down in the transcript, Clauser returns to fluid mechanics, revealing that he himself is quite knowledgeable about it, discussing solitons, compressible flow, the subsonic-supersonic transition, and shock waves.

One of this year's chemistry laurates, Carolyn Bertozzi, has an older sister Andrea, who is a distinguished math professor at UCLA and works in fluid mechanics.  Andrea Bertozzi is co-author (with her doctoral advisor, Andrew Majda) of Vorticity and Incompressible Flow (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Incidentally, their father was an MIT physics professor.

Congratulations to all the 2022 Nobel Laureates in physiology/medicine, physics, and chemistry!