humor

Glenn Seaborg’s old mailing address

Glenn Seaborg’s old mailing address

The occasion of Dmitri Mendeleev’s birthday seemed like a good opportunity to recognize another great hero of the periodic table and to relate one of my favorite anecdotes about him: Glenn T. Seaborg (Wikipedia), who, among his various stellar achievements, won the 1951 Nobel Prize for “discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements.” By the time of his death in 1999, Seaborg had participated in the discovery and isolation of ten superheavy elements. Shortly after the official 1997 recognition of the name seaborgium for element 106, writer Jeffrey Winters, writing in the January 1998 issue of Discover Magazine, made the following observation:

Not that kind of resistance

Not that kind of resistance

My then-girlfriend-and-now-justfriend Melody made this little diorama for her study partner when she was getting her undergraduate EE degree at UT-Austin back in 2003. There’s one more pic on my old personal webpage. It was I who advised her on the spelling; in retrospect, I’m pretty sure it should be “le” instead of “la.”