Talk:List of members of the National Academy of Sciences

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Red links

The red links don't mean the people's articles don't exist, just that the link is wrong. I made all the links just by putting brackets around all the names, and some ended up blue, some ended up red. --brian0918  28 June 2005 13:32 (UTC)

Yep, middle initials may be responsible for many red links. —Lowellian (reply) 10:00, 1 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Explanation of my recent edit

I've changed lots of capital letters to lower-case in section headings. If they're proper names, then they should be capital. But what I found was that at least the first section used lower case. So it is possible that someone capitalized them out of a mistaken idea of Wikipedia conventions (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style concerning section headings). If they should be capital, could someone (1) revert my edit, and (2) capitalize the one[s] that was[were] lower case, and (3) insert a commented-out explanation that they're capitalized because they're proper names (maybe also saying that in the edit summary)? Thanks. Michael Hardy 00:25, 13 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the section headings should not be capitalized, except for the first letter of the first word. —Lowellian (reply) 10:00, 1 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Grace Wahba was omitted from the applied mathematical sciences section

Michael Powell

Is the Michael Powell listed here under Applied mathematical sciences, the son of Colin Powell? If so, he should be linked as Michael Powell (politician). If not, he should be given a different designation like Michael Powell (mathematician). I'm fairly certain he isn't any of the other people listed at Michael Powell. SteveCrook 03:21, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I renamed him Michael Powell (mathematician) and added him to the list eventhough there is no article about him. Kjaergaard 04:35, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. SteveCrook 05:18, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Splitting it up

The page is unwieldy in length. I propose splitting it into its constituent sub-sections. Thoughts? --LQ 03:45, 30 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Let's split it up by alphabet and put TOC links to it. Chris 22:02, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A year alter I come back to this ... It's currently organized by subdiscipline, so it would make more sense to do it that way, don't you think? --lquilter 17:05, 4 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

All right, I'm doing it. To retain consistency I have created two subpage templates for references and standard top-page text. These are at

We should probably also develop a [[List of members of the National Academy of Sciences/infobox|subject infobox}} that can be transcluded onto each page as internal navigation. --Lquilter (talk) 18:03, 29 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

so how is one to see if any given person is included? We need an alphabetic list, instead of this, or in addition to it.DGG (talk) 15:27, 8 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

2 questions:

2 salient questions: why exclude deceased members? And why aren't the lists sortable? Both changes would make the information more complete and accessible to readers. Excluding deceased members minimizes the member's achievements, and necessitates constant gardening as current members die. --Animalparty-- (talk) 20:40, 29 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know why we need to remove deceased members. Perhaps we could mark them with an asterisk instead? The only rationale I can think of is to avoid the lists getting too long, but that doesn't seem like it needs to be an issue, since it's already broken up into several pages. Natureium (talk) 21:34, 15 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Rename

The name of this article seems to originate from the times when English wikipedia only dealt with the United States. The name should definitely be adapted now to e.g. "List of members of the United States National Academy of Sciences". The same applies to Category:Lists of members of the National Academy of Sciences itself, and all the pages below it. - Jochen Burghardt (talk) 08:57, 29 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Updating these lists

Figured I'd put this here so that anyone else who comes across will know I'm actively working on updating these lists! (At least until I run out of steam on it). You can see more detailed progress on my user page. Generally my motivation for doing this has become identifying notable scientists (living and deceased) that don't have articles (or stubs). (Bonus that it's a pretty concrete list of tasks.)

For each sublist, I'm adding deceased members too, but adding (d. <YEAR>) next to their names. As the description for any of these no longer includes "only living members", it seems to be a somewhat silent consensus that deceased members are ok on the lists. As this info never changes, it will involve much less work to keep lists up to date as time goes on (instead of "needing" to remove people over time).

The biggest caveat to my updating right now is that I'm only looking at the lists on the NAS website with the filters: (1) primary appointment ONLY and (2) national members only + rescinded/resigned (only 19 people in these last 2). Meaning I won't be looking through international members, emeritus, public welfare medalists OR rescinded/resigned. If I do look through any of those I'll note it on the sub page (and my user page). Also as I'm going through living and deceased member lists separately, I may miss people on a list that don't fit these criteria. I think this would mostly be non-national members who have since passed away, people listed on their secondary field sublist, or rarely rescinded/resigned people or people mistakenly posted on the list. As of today, non-national member counts: International Members (1213 across all lists), emeritus (509 across all lists), public welfare medalists (84).

I don't know what the best option would be for rescinded/resigned members.

Rescinded seems clear - don't have them on the list. (There are only 3 members in this category anyways.)

Resigned I'm less certain on. In the case of Richard Lewontin, it seems he resigned in disagreement with NAS. I think the options would be "don't have them on the list", "have them on the list, marked resigned", or (my favorite) have a "list of members who have resigned from the NAS" with reasons listed for their resignations. (The table would be slightly different for this list compared to all others).

I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on this as I work my way through the other lists. Cyanochic (talk) 03:11, 2 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]