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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

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spodek·

According to Wikipedia, 835 Nobel Prizes have been awarded. Four people have won two awards.

Winning a first prize is huge. Something like one in ten million people get one.

But apparently winning a second one is easy -- better than one in a thousand get them. The Curie family has six!

(I hope that came out slightly funny and informative)

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Here's a tip: win the second one first, then work your way backwards to the first one.

Computer scientists - who, of course, have a more thorough understanding of recursion - should have little trouble with this.

Sadly, no Nobel Prize rewards computer scientists. You could check if the same statistical fact can be established for the Turing medal.

I don't count Linus Pauling in the same company as the other three.

While he was the 20th Century's premier chemist, by being both absolutely brilliant, and getting his Ph.D. at just the right time to be the first to apply the then new and not yet completed quantum mechanics to chemistry, his second was the notoriously political Peace Prize, and he got that for being a prominent politically correct scientist at the right time.

The entire European Union got one too :-P

Yeah, I'm still waiting for my 42 1/2 p

what is interesting is for the most part his first sequencing (protein sequencing) was made obsolete by his second sequencing (DNA sequencing).

Given that you're a doctor, I think the odds are on the order of around 1/3000 of winning the Nobel for medicine. So maybe that statistic doesn't say much for two-time winners!

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