WINNING HANDILY
Competitive bridge player Geeske Joel, MS '90, PhD '00, captained the six-member team that won the women's board-a-match tournament at the American Contract Bridge League's North American championships in December. Joel started playing seriously eight years ago after joining the 900-member Palo Alto Bridge Club. "The beauty of the game is you can play it at any level and find it challenging and interesting," she told the Palo Alto Weekly. "If you like challenges, there's nothing better." Her team, formed in 2009, placed second in two previous tournaments.
BEST SEATS IN THE HOUSE
In keeping with the 30-year tradition of inviting individuals who exemplify themes laid out in the State of the Union Address to join the First Lady in her viewing box, several Stanford alumni were among the 23 "extraordinary Americans" who attended the President's speech in January. Joining Michelle Obama were San Antonio mayor Julian Castro, '96, Mike Krieger, '08, MS '08, who co-founded photo editing and sharing app Instagram, and Laurene Powell Jobs, MBA '91, founder of the Emerson Collective.
PLAUDIT FOR PLAYWRIGHT
Higher, a play by American Conservatory Theater artistic director Carey Perloff, '80, has won the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation Theatre Visions Fund Award. The award of $50,000 is one of the nation's largest for playwriting and includes $25,000 to support the play's production, $10,000 for the playwright, and $15,000 for A.C.T. to commission two plays during the next year. In Higher, Perloff's fourth full-length play, two American architects entwined in a love affair unknowingly vie to design a high-profile memorial in Israel. The play premiered in February as part of A.C.T.'s 2011–12 season.
"Do not feel that [my] coming to see you is in any way a waste of my time regardless of what use the mathematics may be to you when you get out of the penitentiary. The greatest value to be found in your study of mathematics is, it seems to me, the satisfaction you get from the subject itself with the accompanying sense of achievement."
——Gerald Alexanderson, MS '58, cites a letter written by late Stanford professor Harold Bacon, '28, MA '29, PhD '33, to Alcatraz inmate Rudolph "Dutch" Brandt, whom he tutored in calculus, in a chapter of Fascinating Mathematical People: Interviews and Memoirs.
