With the announcement that Al Gore would share this year's Nobel Peace Prize, the Sacerdote Great Names Series at Hamilton has now hosted five winners of the prestigious award. They include Jimmy Carter (Hamilton's Great Names speaker in 2001), Desmond Tutu (the speaker in 2000), F.W. de Klerk (1998) and Elie Wiesel (1997). Gore spoke at Hamilton in April 2007.
In addition, Hamilton counts among its alumni two Nobel laureates. Elihu Root won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912, and Paul Greengard won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2000. Jonathan Overpeck, who received his Hamilton degree in 1979, was one of 33 lead authors on the report of the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Gore. Overpeck is director of the University of Arizona's Institute for the Study of Planet Earth and professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences.
Root received his degree from Hamilton in 1864 and was a leading figure in American public life. He was U.S. Secretary of War, U.S. Secretary of State and a long-time U.S. senator. Born into a home on the Hamilton campus that now houses the offices of the president and dean of faculty (Buttrick Hall), Root lived his later years in Clinton and served as chairman of Hamilton's Board of Trustees. His home at the time, which now houses offices for the dean of students, registrar and history department, is a National Historic Landmark. It overlooks the Root Glen, a seven and one-half acre wooded garden and ravine on the Hamilton campus.
Greengard, director of the neuroscience laboratory at The Rockefeller University in New York, received his Hamilton degree in 1948. He has made groundbreaking discoveries providing a conceptual framework for understanding how the human nervous system functions at the molecular level, which has resulted in breakthroughs in knowledge and treatment of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, as well as schizophrenia and depression.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Greengard won the Academy's gold medal in recognition of "extraordinary contributions to progress in the fields of neuroscience." In 1995 he returned to Hamilton to present the annual Plant Lecture and to receive The Alumni Achievement Medal. He was awarded an honorary degree from Hamilton in 2001.
In addition, within the past decade, Hamilton welcomed one other current Nobel laureate and one future Nobel laureate to its campus. Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, Africa's most distinguished playwright, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986. He gave a public lecture on the politics of creativity and taught a theatre class at Hamilton in February 2000. The following year, South African writer J.M. Coetzee visited campus and read from his works in the Chapel. A novelist, essayist, literary critic, linguist and translator, Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003.
