Lucasian Litotes

Well, it wasn't a woman (Gee! I'm shocked), although it could have been but the committee wimped out. And it won't be long. At 63, Mike Green is the oldest appointment yet, and if the retirement rules are applied consistently (which they haven't always been), he only gets four years in the prestigious Chair once held by such luminaries as Newton (at 26) and Dirac (at 30). Conventional wisdom has it that theoreticians are past their "sell-by" date in their late twenties, but Newton didn't write The Principia until his mid forties and Hawking is still publishing in his sixties.

Who Will Succeed Hawking?

Now that he is 67 years old, it is Cambridge University policy that Stephen Hawking relinquish his title of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics and so, he resigned that post yesterday but he did not retire from Cambridge University. This event raises the question "Who will succeed him?"