In one year Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize, had a bestselling book, and won an Oscar. What are other historical examples of a person having multiple notable recognitions or achievements within a single year? And no, having sextuplets does not count…
Einstein’s Miracle Year – four papers published in 1905: the photoelectric effect, brownian motion, special relativity, and matter and energy equivalence. In terms of multiple achievements in one year, I think this stands alone in human history.
If two Olympic medals counts, there are many.
John
Jimmy Carter also had a Nobel Peace Prize and a bestseller in the same year. (2002, the book was ‘Christmas in Plains: Memories’, see source).
Tony Dungy has a super bowl title and a bestselling book this year.
IMHO the diversity is more important than numbers. In addition to Olympic medals, lots of people win multiple Tonies, Oscars, or Emmies in a year, but few win a Tony, an Oscar, and an Emmy in a lifetime. IMHO, though, Einstein’s 1905 is still the best, as the diversity of mental skills necessary for relativity and the photoelectric effect is larger than the difference between a Peace Prize and an Oscar.
In the past week my son was born, my mother told me she was proud of me, my wife said she loved me, I got an unexpected raise at work and found $20. Al Gore can suck it.
Well, Nicolas Sarkozy was elected President of France and then voted one of the best dressed men in the world by (was it?) Vogue.
No, that doesn’t count?
Ok…
I think you’ll find athletes like Bobby Fischer, Tiger Woods, Pete Sampras, etc. had “miracle years” where they won several competitions in a row. When great athletes hit a peak, they give stunning performances all year long. The problem is there aren’t many sports where you have many important competitions during the same year.
There’s the Triple Crown, but that’s won by a horse.
Peter wins.
The horse has a Jockey ,a trainer ,and the groom.
Don’t forget, Al Gore also won an Emmy for Current TV this year. This was completely unrelated to any of his work for the environment.
But, he’s still Al Gore. Hypocrite, quitter, stiff board. Does that count as achievements as well?
I’m surprised that blogging comment software doesn’t just automatically disallow multiple repetitions of exactly the same post. One imagines that such repetition could never serve a practical purpose.
No dout there is some pharmacologist who’s won multiple Olympic Golds in one year.
i’m feeling sick now! they should have done better than Gore.
Gore didn’t technically win an Oscar. You have to be listed as a producer of a Best Documentary feature in order to win the award, and Gore didn’t produce “An Inconvenient Truth,” he just took up space in it.
correction, FIVE instead of four. (or four instead of three, depending). (I forgot the brownian motion)
thank God for the Nobel Peace Prize: it make the Economics Prize look serious.
Bo Jackson was the MLB All-Star MVP in 1989 (led off the game with a spectacular HR), ran for nearly 1000 yards with the Raiders, and kicked off the fabulous “Bo Knows” ad campaign.
That was a pretty good year.
in 1994, tim allen had a #1 tv show, a #1 book on the nyt best seller list, and a #1 grossing movie.
In 1933 Hitler became Reich Chancellor, his party the NSDAP won the elections with 43.90% of the votes, he burnt down the Reichstag, prohibited Jews from being civil servants, etc.
Unfortunately for him he was not a luminary of the U.S.Democratic Party, nor a terrorist, nor could he be used to “teach Bush a lesson”: an absolute must for the Norwegian Ladies and Gentlemen ot the Nobel Committee.
Tough luck, Adolf, you did not live in our enlightened times.
Don’t know about awards per se, but I always felt that Newton had a slightly better ‘year’ than Einstein – Newton even managed to avoid the plague..
1945 Harry S Truman. Elected Vice-President. Becomes President of the United States of America. Defeats Germany. Defeats Japan. Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year”.
Having your year compared with Einstein’s, Newton’s, or Truman’s though is a pretty significant compliment.
Terry Tao won the Fields Medal and a McArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2006.
Would Gore have won any of this if George W. Bush wasn’t so hated [justifiably, in my view, but still...]?
I think not.
SNL’s Darrel Hammond did a great skit on Gore showing off his various trophies last Saturday. Not just a Nobel, Oscar and Emmy, but a participation award in “Punt, Pass, and Kick”.
>The Nobel committee isn’t an arm of the US Democratic Party.
The Nobel Peace committee, like virtually every Swedish institution, is Social Democratic, and is considerably to the left of the main line of the US Democratic Party. (A good chunk of the democratic ‘netroots’ activists are social democrats.)
The prize is designed to recognize work which could loosely be called social democratic.
Other winners include Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Woodrow Wilson, Ralph Bunche, Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King Jr, Henry Kissinger, Jody Williams, and Jimmy Carter. I’d suggest the common denominator isn’t their political stripe, but rather their pragmatic efforts towards achieving their goals.
What is the difference between a steel belted radial and having oral sex 365 times?
One is a good year, the other is a very good year.
In 1998 Amartya Sen gave the Romanes Lecture, was appointed master of Trinity College (first Asian to head an Oxbridge college) and was awarded a real Nobel Prize, i.e. not the peace prize. I’d take that over an Oscar and an Emmy.
In 1994, Michael Crichton had the #1 movie (Jurassic Park), the #1 TV show (creator / executive producer of ER), and the #1 book (Disclosure, atop the paperback list).
< <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton>>
Given the reference above to Tim Allen’s success that year, it seems like 1994 was a good year to be #1 in multi-media.
Being somewhat narrow in my interests, I only know cycling. There, nobody seriously compares Lance Armstrong to Eddy Merckx, except in the sense that people say “Lance was a great Tour rider, but he was no Eddy Merckx…”.
Merckx sorta dominated the sport between 1968 and 1974, but 1972 might stand out as his single best year. That year he…
-Won the Tour de France
-Won the points jersey in the Tour de France (this is hard to explain, but it’s roughly an award for most high placings in all stages; usually it is won by a very different kind of racer than the overall winner)
-Won the Giro d’Italia (the equally long and only slightly less prestigious tour of Italy)
-Won four major one-day races (which would be a great year for a rider who specialized in one-day races), plus several lesser races
-Set the Hour Record (distance ridden on a track in 1 hour), which effectively stood until the 1990s. The Hour Record is the most important world-record in cycling: in prestige, it is the only timed record that matters, as if the 400m dash was the only WR anyone cared about in track.
-almost incidentally, won the Super Prestige Pernod (basically, the season championship).
The problem, I suppose, is that what one might really be interested in is a person who has won a great diversity of awards in their field. What feels unusual about Gore’s achievement is that he won three awards we don’t usually associate with a common achievement. It brings to mind Homer Simpson’s fantasy of Lisa winning the Nobel Prize for kickboxing.
So I nominated Tim Allen as the closest guy so far.
However, why not mention Sir Winston Churchill’s 1953? Nobel prize in Literature, made of Knight of the Garter, and he was the sitting PM. That was also the year that the final volume of The Second World War was published, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it was a best-seller. I’d say that trumps Tim Allen, Al Gore, and every sportsman so far in terms of a combination of prestige and diversity of achievement.
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