I was talking to my dad last night and he mentioned that a friend of his, Dr. Danny Schechtman, had just won the Nobel prize in chemistry. He and my dad worked together when Dr. Schechtman was at the National Bureau of Standards.
Here's a link to one of the papers my dad wrote with Dr. Schechtman:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/931226w26181100m/
My dad told me this story: back in the 80s he and Dr. Schechtman were doing some research on TiAl (my dad was interested from a metallurgy perspective) but it would take Dr. Schechtman a few months to do analysis. So my dad wrote a fortran program that could do the research in 10 minutes (I remember him taking me into his office when I was a kid and I would feed punch cards into a machine - possibly part of this software program - also my dad would have to analyze the results to figure out why the software wasn't working - he would bring home reams of this paper with lines of green interspersed with lines of white, a little bigger than 8 x 14, with holes running down the sides and all the pages attached - when he was done with the analysis we would use the paper for drawing pictures, making banners, and creating maps for fake buried treasure that we would leave around the neighborhood to trick people).
When Dr. Schechtman left the National Bureau of Standards he wanted to have the software updated to another language. This must have been, according to my dad, a herculean task because my dad didn't document any of his code.
What I love best about the whole story is how everyone told Dr. Schechtman he was crazy...and of course, he was right!!!!!
Think about that next time someone presents you with an out of the box idea...
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