9th Bronx High School Alumnus Wins Nobel Prize

Claudia Goldin, the one recipient of this yr’s Nobel Prize in Economics, is the ninth graduate of the Bronx High School of Science (’63) to win this prestigious prize.

Bronx Science’s different Nobelists are males: seven in physics and one in chemistry.

Goldin is the 45^th Nobelist within the scientific disciplines — Chemistry, Economics, Medicine and Physics — who graduated from a New York City public highschool, representing an outstanding 6% of the 739 scientific winners since 1901.

Ranking second worldwide for scientific laureates are Brooklyn’s James Madison High School and Phillips Andover in Massachusetts, 5 every.

Seventeen NYC winners are for Physics; 16, Medicine; and 6 every in Chemistry and Economics.

Thirty-nine, together with Goldin, are Jewish.

Three different ladies gained a Nobel Prize in 2023: Hungarian-American Katalin Kariko in Medicine; French-Swedish Anne L’Huillier in Physics; and Narges Mohammadi, the imprisoned Iranian human-rights activist for Peace.

Goldin is the fourth alumnae of a New York City public highschool to obtain the Nobel Prize. The others are for Medicine: Rosalyn Sussman Yalow and Gertrude Elion, from the Bronx’s Walton High School; and Barbara McClintock, Brooklyn’s Erasmus High School.

A 3rd Walton alumna, Anna Schwartz (1915-2012), collaborated with the 1976 Economics laureate Milton Friedman, and her obituary within the New York Times notes that “her supporters thought the prize might have been awarded jointly.”

Only 28 women are winners of a Nobel within the 4 scientific fields, with Polish-French Marie Curie having amazingly gained for Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911). Her daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, was awarded the Chemistry prize in 1935.

NYC’s 4 public highschool winners represent a spectacular 14% of those extraordinary ladies.

Laureates McClintock (1923) and Goldin (‘67) graduated from Cornell, and four other Nobelists from a NYC public high school also received a bachelor’s from this Ivy League college.

Bronx Science’s physicists Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg; physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi (class of 1919) from Brooklyn’s Manual Training High School; and economist Robert Fogel from Stuyvesant High School.

Fogel was Claudia Goldin’s doctoral adviser on the University of Chicago.

For greater than a century, Cornell University’s world-class greatness is partly attributable to welcoming high-achieving Jewish, feminine, Black, Asian and different minority college students.

Two feminine Nobel laureates in Literature acquired a grasp’s diploma from Cornell: Pearl Buck in 1925, and Toni Morrison in 1955.

In 1996, on the 50^th anniversary of coeducation at Bronx Science, I attended a lecture by Harvard Professor Goldin, the place she introduced information that the gender ratio on the college, for all incoming 10^th grade courses all through the Nineteen Sixties, was two males for each feminine.

But, extremely, the category that began in Sept. 1970 was evenly divided between women and men.

This revolutionary change resulted from the 1969 lawsuit, Alice de Rivera v. NYC Board of Education, which abolished the discriminatory partitions that prevented feminine college students from enrolling at Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, the town’s different venerable STEM excessive faculties.

This landmark resolution additionally ended the egregiously unconstitutional quota, of two-boys-for-one woman, at Bronx Science.

At Goldin’s sparsely-attended lecture greater than a quarter-century in the past, I disagreed when she claimed that, if she had not attended Bronx Science, her life wouldn’t have been as profitable, as her native highschool was James Monroe.

I identified Daniel Goldin, the engineer who ran NASA between 1992 and 2001, graduated from this Bronx highschool a couple of years earlier than she completed Bronx Science.

Leon Lederman, the Nobelist in physics in 1988, graduated from James Monroe in 1939.

Furthermore, many neighborhood public excessive faculties had been academically excellent till the early 1970’s, as exemplified by the 2 Nobelists who attended Martin van Buren High School in Queens within the mid-1960’s: Frank Wilczek (Physics, 2004); and Alvin Roth (Economics, 2012).

Moreover, David Julius, the recipient of the Medicine Prize in 2021, writes in a Nobel autobiography that one depressing yr at Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, a three-hour roundtrip from his dwelling in southern Brooklyn, persuaded him to switch to the native highschool, Abraham Lincoln, from which he graduated in 1973.

His two excessive faculties have 4 winners every within the scientific fields.

Eighteen, or 40%, of NYC’s 45 public-school laureates, graduated from excessive faculties with rigorous entrance necessities: Bronx Science, 9; Stuyvesant, 4; Townsend Harris, 3; and Brooklyn Tech, 2.

Twenty-seven, or 60%, graduated from neighborhood tutorial excessive faculties.

In 1986, after I started researching and writing in regards to the Big Apple’s Nobel laureates, Bronx Science had notched three Nobel laureates. Five different male alumni gained the prize throughout the subsequent quarter century.

But I knew that an alumna of my alma mater, which first admitted feminine college students in 1946, would ultimately win in a scientific self-discipline. On October 9, 2023, Claudia Goldin completed this extraordinary feat.

On Oct. 21, in keeping with the twitter account of the Israel Foreign Ministry, 86 Nobel laureates, together with Goldin, indomitably signed a petition addressed to U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, demanding the rapid launch of the kidnapped Israeli kids abominably held hostage by Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

Seven different NYC Nobelists have additionally mobilized for this preeminent humanitarian rescue: Harvey Alter (Medicine); Sheldon Glashow (Physics); Roald Hoffman (Chemistry); Robert J. Lefkowitz (Chemistry); Arno Penzias (Physics); H. David Politzer (Physics); and Alvin Roth (Economics).

Glashow, Lefkowitz and Politzer are additionally Bronx Science graduates.