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Press Coverage of the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, 3 October 2002
The Ig Nobel Prizes (awarded by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research) acknowledge legitimate science researchers for published work that is incomprehensible to the layperson and/or very esoteric in nature. The 2002 awards were announced in a wildly humorous ceremony in Cambridge, MA, on October 3, 2002. There was much press coverage, and some articles covered the role of mathematics in some of the awarded research. According to USA Today, "Then there's Arnd Leike of the University of Munich, who won in physics for his work demonstrating how beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay. The economics award went to the executives and auditors of 28 companies, including Enron, Adelphia, WorldCom and Qwest Communications, for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world."
The award in mathematics went to K.P. Sreekumar and the late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, India, for their analytical report "Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants." [Reference: "Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants (Elephas maximus indicus)," K.P. Sreekumar and G. Nirmalan, Veterinary Research Communications, vol. 14, no. 1, 1990, pp. 5-17.] The Times of India noted the mathematics award: "Kannoth Sreekumar of Kerala Agricultural University earned the Ig Nobel mathematics prize for his paper 'Estimation of the total surface area in Indian Elephants.' Sreekumar was able to derive equations to estimate elephantine surface area from measurements of a couple of body parts, vastly simplifying the problem." The Boston Globe summarizes the proceedings well: "The awards appear to mock science, but they actually celebrate the unconstrained creative mind, the joy of intellectual inquiry and discovery, and the scientific process." And Plus, the online magazine sponsored by Cambridge University, summed it up with, "So we see that whether we are honouring the profound or the bizarre, the winner of all of these prizes is really mathematics."
--- Annette Emerson
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