Princeton postage

The late physicist John Bardeen *36, co-inventor of the transistor and a two-time Nobel Prize winner, is one of four scientists featured in a group of new postage stamps to be released March 6. Bardeen will become one of at least a dozen Princeton alumni featured on U.S. postal issues, joining a list that spans from presidents to pop culture.

James Madison 1771 and Woodrow Wilson 1879 each have appeared on multiple stamps, and a dapper James Stewart ’32 graced his own special issue last year. Princeton authors and playwrights also have been well represented, with stamps featuring F. Scott Fitzgerald ’17 (the background shows the green light on Daisy Buchanan’s dock), Eugene O’Neill ’10, and Thornton Wilder *26.

Statesmen John Foster Dulles 1908 and Adlai Stevenson ’22 were honored with stamps in the 1960s. Nearly a century earlier, Benjamin Rush 1760, Richard Stockton 1748, and former University President John Witherspoon appeared on an 1869 stamp that commemorated the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Bardeen will be in familiar company in the American Scientists stamp series. Earlier honorees include Richard Feynman *42, a fellow Nobel laureate in physics, and mathematician John von Neumann, a onetime Princeton professor who was on the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study during Bardeen’s time on campus.