2003 MacArthur 'Genius Grant' Winners Announced

ccnull writes "This year's list of 24 MacArthur Fellows has been released. Each winner of the so-called 'Genius Grant' receives $500,000, no strings attached. 2003's winners include a blacksmith, a biomedical engineer, a computation geometer, a biophysicist, a nurse, and a short story writer 'crafting witty, experimental prose.'"

Comments

Why not a teacher?

[mistert2]

How long has it been since a teacher got a decent raise? Politicians love to make points by slamming the profession. I know there are some clunkers, but show me the money.

Why not me? I am not going to make it in my profession.

Erik D. Demaine

[Gurudev Das]

Erik Demaine is also a recipient. He is the one who showed Tetris is an NP-complete problem.

Ivy league representation

[BWJones]

Interestingly, among the academics given the MacArthur grants, the Ivy league schools Harvard, MIT and Yale appear to be producing a number of these folks whether at the undergraduate level, the graduate level or the faculty level. Many of the recipients appear to have done at least some time at those institutions.

Re:Eccentric Fund.

[Dirk Pitt]

Dostoevsky said that "beauty will save the world." I don't understand why it's beyond the capacity of the average Slashdotter to imagine that art, literature, and other parts of our culture could have some value equal to medical research and other 'practical' matters.

Try going to a museum some time. Some of the greatest works of art ever done were conceived with the help of huge amounts of private funding. Michelangelo was no starving artist; many of his benefactors chose to lavish him with riches. Why should modern trusts do any less?

I'm an engineer and as pragmatic as the next guy, but given a world without art and beauty, just give me the cancer -- what's the point?

BTW, if this was sarcasm and I missed it, I'm very happy and apologize in advance.

Is The Selection Process Geographically Biased?

[gbulmash]

I find it interesting that 38% of the recipients can be found in two cities (9 recipients in New York and Boston) that maybe account for 5-6% of the total U.S. population. Throw in another 2 recipients in Connecticut and Georgia and the "East Coast" accounts for nearly half of all the awards.

Probably more out of skew is 2 awards going to New Mexico residents (8.3% of the awards going to an area with 0.75% of the population).

Closer to skew is 4 awards (16.67%) going to California residents (10-11% of the population) and even more so if you count that as "West Coast" instead of just California.

When you deduct the two awards to international residents, that leaves 5 awards (20.83%) to be spread among the other 44 states. Those went to residents of Colorado, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.

Does that mean the remaining 39 states do not contain sufficient genius to warrant an award? Does that mean that we have an abnormally high concentration of genius in New York and Boston? While New York and Boston residents would probably like to think so, maybe put on big foam fingers and drunkenly shout "We're Number One", the rest of the nation would likely disagree.

Going through a portion of the historical listing of winners (last names starting with A-F), we find that out of 164 winners, 70 (42.7%) resided in the states of New York or Massachusets, and 30 (18.3% of total recipients, 62.5% of all New York state recipients) were in New York City. An additional 56 (34.1%) were in California, but those were more evenly spread out with only 11 (6.7% of total, 19.6% of state) being in Los Angeles.

So historically, based on that list, you have nearly 77% of all recipients being concentrated in 3 states and over 18% of them in just one city.

I'm sure the recipients of these grants are deserving, hard-working, geniuses in their own right. I just wonder if their geographic location is giving them an unfair advantage over geniuses in the rest of the U.S.

- Greg , though that still weights Cali's share of the awards above its share of the , just short of half of the recipients (11) are on the East Coast, 9 of them in New York or Massachusets (the other 2 are in Connecticut and Georgia).