<p>so I think the Wikipedia page that lists Nobels by university affiliation has perhaps unintentionally omitted Northwestern. Based on a search that took about thirty seconds, I came across the articles below. If Myerson is added to the list and no other prize winners had an NU affiliation, it would come out to at least 9. Not too bad when you think UCLA has 10 on the Wikipedia article. Northwestern chemistry has really come in to its own in the last few years and it will not be a surprise if current research there or at Feinberg is recognized by the Nobel commitee in 20 or 30 years.</p>
<p>And obviously no offense to the U of C, which I believe is the most academic school in the country, but there is a lot of built-in, um, inflation, to the method it uses to count laureates:</p>
<p>[A</a> Nobel Prize for Creativity - Los Angeles Times](<a href=“http://articles.latimes.com/2005/oct/10/science/sci-nobelinflate10]A”>A Nobel Prize for Creativity)</p>
<p>Renowned physicists Hans Bethe and Werner Heisenberg and economics guru Paul A. Samuelson are all counted among Chicago’s Nobel brethren.</p>
<p>Wait a minute.</p>
<p>Didn’t Bethe spend virtually his entire career at Cornell University? Isn’t Samuelson considered the heart and soul of MIT economics? Did Heisenberg even spend more than a few months in Chicago?</p>
<p>“I think the University of Chicago counts everyone who ever walked through there,” said Herbert Kroemer, a UC Santa Barbara professor who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 2000.</p>
<p>Counting Nobel Prizes is the ultimate academic sport. It is a no-holds-barred exercise in selective memory and fuzzy math.</p>
<p>Universities that normally pride themselves on academic virtues and scholastic precision can find themselves grasping for any plausible thread of affiliation with those anointed by Stockholm.</p>
<p>[Chemistry</a> 1998](<a href=“http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1998/]Chemistry”>http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1998/)</p>
<p>[News</a> On Campus](<a href=“http://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/northwestern/janfeb99/cnewsjf99.htm]News”>News On Campus)</p>
<p>Chemistry Professor Wins Nobel
John Pople unlocks the theoretical properties of molecules. </p>
<hr>
<p>Northwestern professor John A. Pople, a pioneer in the theoretical study of the properties of molecules, won the 1998 Nobel Prize in chemistry in October.
The British-born Pople, a Board of Trustees Professor who has been in the chemistry department since 1986, went out of his way to praise others, calling himself "a container for the work of my predecessors over the last 50 years.</p>
<p>“I consider this a great honor not only for myself, but for all the students who have worked with me over the years,” he said. “I’ve been blessed with superb colleagues and students, many of whom are in positions of eminence themselves. This is for them as well.”</p>
<p>Pople’s Nobel was the eighth for Northwestern faculty or alumni. He shared the honor - and half the $978,000 award - with Walter Kohn, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose research is similar to Pople’s but is more focused on the properties of solid materials, such as metals.</p>
<p>“This is a great honor for John and Northwestern,” said provost Lawrence B. Dumas. “We’ve known for many years that his work was worthy of this recognition. We have an outstanding chemistry department, and this reaffirms the importance of John’s pioneering research in computational chemistry.”</p>
<p>Pople was rewarded, in the words of the Nobel Prize Committee, “for developing computational methods making possible the theoretical study of molecules, their properties and how they act together in chemical reactions. These methods are based on the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics.”</p>
GO</p>