ABSTRACT
The Ig Nobel Prizes have been given out every year since 1991 by the international science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research or AIR as it is more commonly known. The 2005 ceremony was held on October 6th at Harvard University’s historic Sanders Theatre. It was attended by a live audience of 1,200 lab coat and sundry attired individuals who continuously flooded the stage with paper airplanes and other ephemera. This was a slight inconvenience as the ceremony’s traditional stage sweeper, Harvard physics professor Roy Glauber, was not in attendance. Two days before the Ig Nobel Ceremony, he received a telephone call from Stockholm, informing him that he had been awarded a Nobel Prize in physics. Eight of the ten Ig Nobel Prize winners traveled to Harvard-at their own expense-to accept their prizes, which were handed to them personally by Nobel Laureates Dudley Herschback (Chemistry ’86), William Lipscomb (Chemistry ’76), Sheldon Glashow (Physics ’79), and Robert Wilson (Physics ’78). Wilson, by the way, was the prize in the annual Win-a-Date-with-a-
for
Nobel-Laureate Contest. (A video is available at https://www.improb .com-of the ceremony, not the date.)
A great deal of mathematics and calculations go into winning some of these Gardneresque prizes. Here are a few winners from previous years:
• The Southern Baptist Church of Alabama won for calculating how many Alabama citizens will go to Hell if they don’t repent [2]. Answer: 46.1
• Robert Faid of Greenville, South Carolina, won for calculating the exact odds that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist [4]. Answer: 710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1.
