The Ig Nobel Prize · route
There is a prize that mimics the Nobel: the Ig Nobel, given for research that first makes people laugh and then makes them think. Ten are awarded each year, and there are now more than 350. Fifteen of them are set out here on the map. The frog floating in mid-air leads, ten years on, to a real Nobel Prize, and a Korean high-school student's coffee cup is here too.
The Ig Nobel is not a prize that sneers at bad research. Most of the work is done in earnest; only the subject is funny. The banana-skin study touches on artificial joints, the slime mould's railway on the design of networks, the sloshing coffee cup on fluid dynamics.
For the Ig Nobels the full list is not given, only the fifteen chosen stations. Two are Korean stations: the fragrant suit of 1999 and walking backwards with coffee in 2017. At the last station, the 2026 ceremony in Zurich, the Nobel, Fields and Turing routes all meet.