Peg Skorpinski photo.

18 October 00 | After learning that their professor, Daniel McFadden, had just won the Nobel Prize, graduate students hoped their newly celebrated teacher would cancel his afternoon class. It didn't happen.

The Nobelist arrived - on the heels of a 12-hour whirlwind of photo ops, press interviews, and receptions in his honor - tailed by an entourage of news cameramen and photographers.

After a round of applause from students, McFadden remarked wryly that the media jostling at the edges of the classroom would probably not want to stay for the entire lecture - then proceeded to expound on spectral methods, lag operators, the Toplitz matrix and vectors in the time domain.