Princeton’s Annan Professor of English Susan Stewart is one of seven authors honored with a 2009 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Read the announcements from Princeton University and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Learn about Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, translated by Susan Stewart.

As part of our Math Awareness Month celebrations, we posed our series of questions about mathematics and climate study to Tapio Schneider, a Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Caltech. Dr. Schneider conducts research on the dynamics of the Earth’s climate changes, turbulence, and turbulent transport in the atmosphere and oceans. He is also co-editor with Adam H. Sobel of the PUP book The Global Circulation of the Atmosphere.

PUP: What are you currently working on?

Tapio Schneider: I am working on theories of how large-scale (>1000 km) atmospheric turbulence influences the global climate. For example, we study how turbulent transport affects tropical circulations and how it controls the distribution of atmospheric water vapor and rainfall.

PUP: How did you become interested in this field?

TS: I am fascinated by how nature works. I was trained as a physicist and loved how physics helped explain the inanimate world around me, from refrigerators to cell phones to the blue color of the sky and the red color of sunsets. I particularly like the physics of everyday phenomena—phenomena that occur roughly at the energy of sunlight (for example, many quantum phenomena occur at the energy of sunlight, and in part because of that, quantum devices such as the transistor revolutionized our life). When I was looking for a research area for graduate studies, I was looking for a young field with open questions to which young scientists can make lasting and fundamental contributions. Atmospheric dynamics is such a field—and the phenomena certainly occur at the energy of sunlight!

January 25, 2009 was cause for celebration, and perhaps an occasion for delighting in the culinary delicacy known as haggis. Yes, the hugely popular poet (and Scottish national treasure) Robert Burns was born 250 years ago. Robert Crawford, a celebrated poet in his own right, has now published the first comprehensive and up-to-date biography of [...]