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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

I got excited because I thought maybe Emmy Noether was going to get a stamp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether

Both Emmy Noether and Madame Curie cannot be so honored because the first rule of https://about.usps.com/who/csac/#criteria is that the subject has to be American or critical to American history.

Therefore an American citizen who is a physicist can be recognized for her contribution to physics, but a German or French citizen cannot be.

From the link (and in the same rule):

> Other subjects may be considered if the subject had significant impact on American history, culture or environment.

What would qualify someone for that? And why would those two (Noether and Curie) not qualify?

I would assume that someone like Lafayette could be on a stamp.

I'd expect the qualification would be, basically, would you expect to find this person in a book of US History (and not merely as a member of a foreign power, like, say, Churchill)? I think that this is probably a reasonable "you know it when you see it" situation, but I'm sure you could find edge-cases if that was your goal.

I doubt Marie Curie would say that she had anything to do with American history.

You pick interesting examples.

Winston Churchill's mother is American and he is also one of 8 people in history to be granted honorary American citizenship. Therefore he is American enough that a case can be made for putting him on a US stamp.

Lafayette would, of course, qualify on his own merits because he was directly important to US history. But in addition he is another of the 8 honorary US citizens in history.

The full list of honorary citizens is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_citizenship_of_the_Un....

It is worth noting that Mother Theresa is also on that list and actually has a stamp. See https://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2010/pb22290/html/inf....

Ha, my examples made up a quarter of the list, that's brilliant, I had no idea, thank you.

You don’t think Marie Curie has anything to do with the country that ran the Manhattan Project?

I think you're reaching. Obviously every inventor or discoverer affects the course of history in every country that uses that invention or discovery. We could put Marconi on as "critical to American history" because we never might not have the war without the radio. Or put Martin Luther on, because without him a bunch of protestants wouldn't have crossed over on the Mayflower. Or Mendel because without the understanding of genetics, our GMO companies wouldn't be making billions.

The only mention in the United States in Marie Curie's Wikipedia article is a brief tour she did of the US in her later years to raise money.

Beware of confusing standing on the shoulders of giants and the one pulling the trigger. Might as well blame Isaac Newton for the bomb while you're at it.

Maybe a simple way to think about it is this: Curie was a Polish-French physicist, and so a collector would more expect her to be honored by a postage stamp issued by Poland or France... and indeed she has, more than once. I also see some Marie Curie stamps issued by French colonies, which was probably thought to contribute to the unity of the empire.

Emmy Noether moved to the US in 1933 in light of Nazi persecution and died in the US. I guess she never obtained citizenship in the 2-3 years she was there.

I thought it was Madame Curie.

Yeah, I ran through the list in my head as well: Marie Curie, Irene Joliot-Curie, Lise Meitner and Emmy Noether were the ones that came immediately to mind. All of them deserve to be well-known.

Same, Marie Curie is by far much more recognized/contributed to nuclear physics...

She was the first woman to win Nobel, (and won it twice)

Measuring parity violation is one heck of a thing. Wu is less of a household name, but within fundamental physics, her experiment is one of the great milestones.

For context, only four people won Nobel twice (Frederick Sanger, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen and Marie Curie), and from that list, her is the only name I recognise.

If you’re on this website you may be interested to learn that Bardeen won for inventing the transistor.

(His other prize was for explaining super conductivity; he won for experimental work and separately for theoretical work!)

Bardeen didn’t bring his young children to the Nobel award ceremony the first time. The King asked him where they were and jokingly said Bardeen had ought to bring them next time. And so he did!

She's also the only one of them who won in two different scientific disciplines: physics and chemistry. Linus Pauling (who was pretty famous to a previous generation, though maybe not quite as famous as Curie) won also won in two different disciplines, but one of them was the peace prize.

RB Woodward won the 1965 Chemistry Nobel Prize for his astounding achievements in total synthesis. Some people say that he should have been awarded a part of the 1973 prize that went to Fischer and Wilkinson for sandwich compounds, and he definitively would have received it again in 1981 together with Fukui and Hoffmann for explaining how orbitals influence stereochemistry.

Other than Curie, I recognized Pauling, though admittedly more from his obsessive crackpot advocacy for taking massive doses of vitamin C. https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7547741/vitamin-c-myth-pauling

Although Marie Curie probably wouldn't object to other female scientists being honoured:

https://xkcd.com/896/

And I thought Emilie du Chatelet

I thought Lise Meitner. Not U.S. though.

Noether was a mathematician, not a physicist.

Ms. Wu seems great too...

The person you were replying to was less implying Wu is undeserving of the honor and more suggesting that when one hears "First Lady of Physics", most would think of Noether (which I feel is likely accurate for those versed in physics history).

Yep, nothing against Wu.

same!

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