EE Wins the Nobel Prize for Physics
Miscellaneous October 7th. 2009, 4:49amCharles K. Kao, who got his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College London, and founded the Electrical Engineering Department at Chinese University of Hong Kong, was just awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work on fiber optic communications.
This is really amazing to me, a trained engineer winning this award. Yes, John Bardeen won two of these, but he was really trained as a physicist. I’m willing to bet money that physicists don’t like this decision.
October 14th, 2009 at 12:00 am
This is really great news! It kind of offsets some of the other Nobel decisions this year.
I’m glad to see an EE get this award. Compared with the sciences and mathematics, I think we as engineers have very few high visibility awards. Actually I can’t think of any awards for engineers that someone, say outside of IEEE, would even know.
This is also well deserved because the recipient, as you point out, founded the EE department in CUHK, which is by now quite well known.