If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off no matter what they say—Barbara McClintock

David Oxtoby is the president of AAAS. He just announced the 2021 new members. See the press release.

Today I thought I would explain which choices are correct and which are

Just kidding. Of course they all are terrific choices. Here are some choices in previous years—going back a little while:

The new class joins Academy members elected before them, including Benjamin Franklin (elected 1781) and Alexander Hamilton (1791) in the eighteenth century; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1864), Maria Mitchell (1848), and Charles Darwin (1874) in the nineteenth; Albert Einstein (1924), Robert Frost (1931), Margaret Mead (1948), Groucho Marx (1951), Milton Friedman (1959), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966), and Anthony Fauci (1991) in the twentieth.

Computer Science

Here they are with some fun facts.

Demis Hassabis (International Honorary Member), DeepMind
Child chess prodigy: at the age of 13 had an Elo rating of 2300.

Charles Isbell, Georgia Institute of Technology
Started the Black History Database.

Fei-Fei Li, Stanford University
Helped create ImageNet.

Muriel Medard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Co-founded multiple companies.

Stefan Savage, University of California, San Diego
Uses cool names for projects: Jetset, Trufflehunter,

Margo Seltzer, University of British Columbia
Very busy: see her calendar

Daniel Spielman, Yale University
Once held a professorship named for “Hank the Deuce” or “HF2”.

[re-aligned photo at top]

Mathematics

Yakov Eliashberg, Stanford University
Benson Farb, University of Chicago
Nader Masmoudi, New York University
Kavita Ramanan, Brown University
Scott Sheffield, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Karen Smith, University of Michigan
Amie Wilkinson, University of Chicago

Open Problems

Do you have better fun facts on the winners? Let us know if you do.