
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019 - spazz
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2019/summary/
======
NonEUCitizen
John Goodenough is 97 years old and still moving the state of the art
forward...

[https://cen.acs.org/people/profiles/Podcast-97-lithium-
ion-b...](https://cen.acs.org/people/profiles/Podcast-97-lithium-ion-
battery/97/i35) (article also mentions he studied with Zener after whom Zener
diodes are named)

Middle-aged startup founders are kids!

~~~
jabl
> article also mentions he studied with Zener after whom Zener diodes are
> named

I have noticed this phenomenon myself a lot. If you're in science, look at the
Wikipedia pages of people who are today big names in your field and I can
almost guarantee you'll find somebody even more famous as their PhD
supervisor.

I think it's things like "rock stars" get to pick the best students, those
students having good role models, having it easier to land a position when
your thesis advisor is some bigwig, but also that science has been expanding
exponentially so a much larger fraction of the oldies were bigwigs who did big
discoveries in their fields.

(my own thesis advisor shared an office with Josephson back in the day
(Josephson junctions, which led to SQUIDS, NMR/MRI). That was before Josephson
got the Nobel, as IIRC the youngest physics laureate ever, and before he went
mad and started peddling Uri Geller style mind-over-matter claptrap.)

~~~
m463
Smart people clump together, and there are network effects.

------
radicalbyte
The title is very uninformative, so:

This year it was won by John B Goodenough, M Stanley Whittingham and Akira
Yoshino for their work on the chemistry which enables the Lithium-Ion battery.

------
vbezhenar
IMO Lithium-Ion batteries enabled a whole lot of computer devices:
smartphones, watches, laptops. The world would not be the same without those
batteries.

~~~
puranjay
They're also instrumental for electric cars, which, provided cleaner
electricity generation, might have a massive positive impact on the
environment

------
hatmatrix
Interesting that they also awarded a person (Yoshino) doing a very practical
aspect of the work (making it commercially viable), which is typically out of
the scope of fundamental discoveries these awards target. As I understand it,
anyway.

