I'm pretty excited that Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa won the Nobel Prize for Physics this year.

I was lucky enough to study at the University of Chicago in the presence of a number of Nobel Prize winners. You'd see them in the halls and look at their pictures on the wall -- it's pretty inspiring. Although Professor Nambu didn't teach when I was there, I would see him at the colloquium every Thursday. He'd sit in the front few rows, usually to the right. He seems really modest -- lots of speakers would talk about "Goldstone Bosons" in particle physics and be oblivious to the fact that the correct term is "Nambu-Goldstone Bosons" and that the Nambu is sitting right there. He'd never correct the speakers.

My thesis experiment measured a component of the Kobayashi-Maskawa mixing matrix, so that too is very important to me. Their work builds on the work of Nicola Cabibbo, and the mixing matrix is usually referred to as the CKM matrix for all three of them. I'm surprised Cabibbo didn't win together with Kobayashi and Maskawa.

As a funny aside, my advisor and friend Ed Blucher was woken up at 3:30 this morning by Japanese reporters cold-calling physics profs at U of C, looking for anyone who knows anything about Professor Nambu.