Ig

In September, his preprint received an Ig Nobel Prize, a satirical award that promotes research that “makes people laugh, then think.”

The character, married to Granny Pig and the father of Mummy Pig and Aunt Dottie, was referred to as "Papa Ig" by his young grandson George.

His research on this amusing speaking style drew enough attention to garner him an Ig Nobel Prize, an award sponsored by Harvard University since 1991 for research that “first makes people laugh and then think.”

Counting nose hairs in cadavers, repurposing dead spiders and explaining why scientists lick rocks, are among the winning achievements in this year’s Ig Nobels, the prize for humorous scientific feats, organizers announced Thursday.

He, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson shared the literature Ig Nobel for analyzing what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand, research that appeared in the journal “Cognition.”