Talk:Nicholas Hughes

Notability
Wilbeaux (talk) 13:33, 23 March 2009 (UTC) Nicholas Hughes's suicide is a number one article in the United States page of Yahoo News. Any person who zooms up the news to the top is clearly being taken note of by a wide variety of people for a wide variety of reasons. Ah, bearish Wikipedia editors ...


 * Can anyone find anything written about Hughes prior to his suicide? --Evb-wiki (talk) 15:16, 23 March 2009 (UTC)


 * would you include poems by his mother and his father? --Moloch09 (talk) 19:27, 23 March 2009 (UTC)


 * No. By their nature, IMO they are not reliable sources (unless they are claiming to be factual, which they aren't), considering rhetoric, poetic license, hyperbole, etc. His parents poems that mention him or were inspired by him convey no factual biographical information, so I would not include them. --Evb-wiki (talk) 19:33, 23 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Reliability in the sense you use it - absenting and removing all expressive vocabulary - would clearly exclude all fictional characters from WP, a clearly untenable position. The fact two famous poets cite him is notable by any standards, and his sad death even more so. But good luck with your current position, which is obviously related to nominating this article for AfD. The encyclopaedic nature of the WP would merit an separate article on this person by any standards. --Moloch09 (talk) 19:55, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

I think Nicholas Hughes's suicide is notable, even if his life taken as a whole is not necessarily, due to the echos of the lives of the other family members therein Stuartyeates (talk) 05:51, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I would say his life and death are notable, as there's interest in what became of Plath's children following her suicide. (I myself did not know about her children's later lives until looking them up here.) The fact that he himself suffered from depression and eventually died in the same way also connects to larger issues of genetics and circumstances perhaps figuring in suicide cases. Codenamemary (talk) 18:51, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Place of birth?
The article says he was American born, but I believe he was born in England. His sister Frieda Hughes was born in 1960 in England, he was born in 1962, and his mother died in England in 1963. If I'm not mistaken, they were in England during that entire period. Anyone got a source? --Evb-wiki (talk) 16:53, 23 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Anyway, I removed it. --Evb-wiki (talk) 19:35, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Born in England
Looking up various online biographies, but this for the moment from poets.org

"After graduation, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet, Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Plath and Hughes were married, on June 16, 1956.

Plath returned to Massachusetts in 1957, and began studying with Robert Lowell. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States.

She returned to England where she gave birth to the couple's two children, Freida and Nicholas Hughes, in 1960 and 1962, respectively.

In 1962, Ted Hughes left Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. That winter, in a deep depression, Plath wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel.

In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Then, on February 11, 1963, during one of the worst English winters on record, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor instructing him to call the doctor, then she committed suicide using her gas oven."

Plenty more where that came from. His sister Frieda Hughes is a notable artist in her own right, and did the illustrations for Ted Hughes' Plath Tribute The Birthday Letters. Will find more —Preceding unsigned comment added by Moloch09 (talk • contribs) 17:58, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

More on notability
Nicholas appears in the poetry of both Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes Mr Hughes appears in both of his parents' poetry. According to The Telegraph

In Nick and the Candlestick, published after Plath's death, she wrote:

“You are the one Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.”

Later his father wrote of how, after Plath’s death, their son’s eyes

“Became wet jewels, The hardest substance of the purest pain As I fed him in his high white chair”.

A family friend told the Times: “Nick wasn’t just the baby son of Plath and Hughes and it would be wrong to think of him as some kind of inevitably tragic figure. He was a man who reached his mid-forties, an adventurous marine biologist with a distinguished academic career behind him and a host of friends and achievements in his own right. That is the man who is mourned by those who knew him.” —Preceding unsigned comment added by Moloch09 (talk • contribs) 18:10, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Statement by Frieda Hughes issued late on Sunday evening, Frieda Hughes reported:

"It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16 March 2009 at his home in Alaska. He had been battling depression for some time.

"His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence for the next project or plan."

According to the Guardian

"the American-born poet who gassed herself in the kitchen of her north London home in February 1963 while her one-year-old son and his two-year-old sister, Frieda, slept in their cots in a nearby room. Plath had placed towels around the kitchen door to make sure the fumes did not reach her children."

According to the Fairbanks Daily News Miner

"Hughes became a prominent fisheries scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he earned a doctorate in 1991 and joined the faculty....He spent countless summer hours in his research of grayling and salmon in the Chena River, exhibiting all the patience and wonder that defines a great fisherman. One of his innovations was rigging underwater cameras to get a three-dimensional view of the fish feeding in the passing current. The focus of Nick’s professional life... dealt with what might appear to be a simple question, but was extraordinarily complex: “Why do fish prefer one position over another?”

The logic of his research was that the combination of water flow and the streambed guide the way natural selection influences the behavior of individual salmon, grayling, trout and other species. And the behavior of individual fish can help explain population dynamics and other questions about life.... Nick spent time in New Zealand as well as Alaska pursuing all aspects of his research....

A few times, I called him to let him know I would like to write about his life and his family connections, whenever a news story about his parents appeared, but he did not think it was a good idea, so it never happened. He deserved his privacy.... Here he was not a literary figure forever defined by the lives of his parents." Dermot Cole--Moloch09 (talk) 18:20, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Marine biologist?
I don't think this is the most accurate description of his field. Marine biology has to do with the ocean -- whereas his work had most to do with fish in stream ecologies -- i.e., in fresh water. E.g., the brief bio of him at the Chena River Chinook Salmon Study website:


 * Nick Hughes is a leader in the field of stream salmonid ecology, particularly drift-feeding stream fish like juvenile Chinook salmon. He has more than 20 years of experience working in interior Alaska and has worked extensively on salmonid ecology in New Zealand. He is responsible for developing a variety of models that are now in use around the world, including models to predict food intake, distribution, and abundance of drift-feeding fish.

I most frequently have seen him described as a fisheries biologist or fisheries ecologist. --Yksin (talk) 21:44, 23 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Update. I've changed it to "fisheries biologist" in the lede. -- Yksin (talk) 21:48, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

"Iron Man"/"Iron Giant"
Wasn't Hogarth Hughes from the novel and movie based on Nicholas Hughes?Inkan1969 (talk) 22:25, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Publications
It seems only appropriate to include a section with at least a select list of Hughes' peer-reviewed scholarly publications. Not necessarily toward establishing notability, but because papers are the product and record of scientists, as poems are to poets.IanHerriott (talk) 05:53, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Maybe a selection of particularly notable ones that have bearing on the rest of the article or his life (I'm skeptical that there is evidence that any of his publications are such, but happy to be convinced). But a scientists stock and trade is publications&dash;you don't list every hit/out a baseball player made in an article on one of them. Bear in mind WP:NOTDIRECTORY and WP:NORESUMES. Bongo  matic  06:02, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Point taken. WP is not the place to list every hit/out, or every poem, or every paper. Still, a bio of a baseball player with no mention of a batting average or stats, or a poet with no reference to a poem, or a scientist without a single paper... That's my take anyway. Choosing a short list could be done by assessing citation number and impact factor of the journal. The Ecology publication is an obvious candidate as a well-cited paper in a high impact journal.IanHerriott (talk) 06:22, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Don't disagree in the least with the principle, but think that often putting a couple of key achievements (publications or otherwise) in textual context (i.e., not lists) often reads better and more encyclopedically. Don't have a view on which publications in his case are the ones to highlight, but your approach seems rational. Bongo  matic  08:59, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Citizenship
I removed the claim that Hughes was "American" pending resolution of actual information about his citizenship -- given that he was born of an American mother & British father, & was born & raised in the U.K. Since then, a resume included with a grant proposal that someone linked to in the AfD debate has disclosed that he held dual American/UK citizenship. Just don't have time to change it right now with proper citation because it's late & I need some sack time. But will do so tomorrow if someone else doesn't get to it first. --Yksin (talk) 08:51, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * He's still categorized by Category:American marine biologists. Postdlf (talk) 22:26, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I removed the cat as it appears to be less than accurate. See also the talk section above re "marine biologist." --Evb-wiki (talk) 23:43, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I added the dual citizenship info with a cite to his vita currently online at his former department at UAF. Unfortunately, though the vita had been posted in March 1998, it doesn't appear to have been updated since around 2002 -- but still some good info.  Now I'm going to wander downstairs & take a look at his doctoral dissertation.  (I'm at UAF's sister institution in Anchorage.) --Yksin (talk) 03:01, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

University of Oxford
Do we know which college he attended at Oxford? AlexTiefling (talk) 15:25, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

I changed BS to BA as Oxford has never awarded BS degrees (which is an American Title) or the British equivalent (BSc) all undergraduate bachelors degrees are BA regardless of whether the area studied is an arts subject or a science

Ref worthy of incorporation
Bongo matic  03:27, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

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