Benjamin List's Birth Card: The 3 of Spades

In the record

Benjamin List (born 11 January 1968) is a German chemist who is one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research and professor of organic chemistry at the University of Cologne. The birth-card coordinate for January 11 is the 3 of Spades — a calendar position, not a forecast of the 2021 Chemistry prize.

Nobel Prize record

• 2021 The Nobel Prize in Chemistry — for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis

The 3 of Spades coordinate

Benjamin List's birthday maps to the 3 of Spades (The Sorrowful Truth). Card Blueprints treats that as a 365-day coordinate: solar value = 55 − (2 × month + day), and the year is unused. It is not a prediction about a Nobel Prize and not a verdict on Benjamin List. The card's own language, quoted as system copy rather than biography: You stay with the hard feeling long enough to learn it, then you let the day continue.

Live 3 of Spades meaning page

Benjamin List in the public record

He co-developed organocatalysis, a method of accelerating chemical reactions and making them more efficient. He shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David MacMillan "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis". Born to an upper-middle-class family of scientists and artists in Frankfurt, List is a great-grandson of the cardiologist Franz Volhard and a 2nd great-grandson of the chemist Jacob Volhard. His aunt, the 1995 Nobel laureate in medicine Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, is the sister of his mother, architect Heidi List. At age three, his parents divorced. List obtained his Diplom (M.Sc.) degree in chemistry from the Free University of Berlin in 1993, and his PhD from Goethe University Frankfurt in 1997. His doctoral dissertation was titled Synthese eines Vitamin B 12 Semicorrins (Synthesis of a Vitamin B 12 Semicorrin), and was advised by Johann Mulzer. List worked at the Scripps Research Institute Department of Molecular Biology in La Jolla, US as a postdoctoral researcher in Carlos F.

Summarised from the lead section of the Wikipedia article Benjamin List (CC BY-SA 4.0). No biographical facts were written for this page beyond that article.

Where the record meets the Jack of Diamonds

A card is a calendar coordinate, not a cause. What follows sets one line of the card's own published language beside one sentence of the sourced record, paired by a documented rule. It is a resemblance offered for the reader to weigh — not a claim about Benjamin List, and not a forecast of a Nobel Prize.

You try a new approach to value and you finish enough of it to know if it works. You bring new ways of thinking about resources and success. You're the one who shifts how people relate to money. You inspire financial breakthroughs.

List's parents sought to raise their children with an anti-authoritarian parenting style; he has admitted occasionally using the approach with his own children, stating that "you may only be 12, but if you think it will do you good to eat ten chocolate bars, then go ahead and do it.

Paired on shared wording: approach, think.

Also on the record

1. Barbas III and Richard Lerner's research groups from 1997 to 1998 with a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and as an assistant professor from 1999 to 2003.
2. In 2003 he returned to Germany to become group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research, and in 2005 he became one of the institute's directors, heading the Homogeneous Catalysis Department.
3. He served as the institute's managing director from 2012 to 2014.
4. He has held a part-time position as an honorary professor of organic chemistry at the University of Cologne since 2004.

Other laureates with this card

• Albert Fert — 2007 Physics
• Alfred Kastler — 1966 Physics
• David Baltimore — 1975 Physiology or Medicine
• George Paget Thomson — 1937 Physics
• Ivar Giaever — 1973 Physics
• J. M. Coetzee — 2003 Literature
• Jacques Monod — 1965 Physiology or Medicine
• Jeffrey C. Hall — 2017 Physiology or Medicine
• Joseph E. Stiglitz — 2001 Economic Sciences
• Julius Wagner-Jauregg — 1927 Physiology or Medicine
• Kailash Satyarthi — 2014 Peace
• Kip S. Thorne — 2017 Physics
• 6 more laureates share this card.

FAQ

What is Benjamin List's birth card?

The 3 of Spades. January 11 maps to that card through the public Card Blueprints formula. The year of birth is not used.

Does a birth card predict a Nobel Prize?

No. These pages are coordinates, not fortune-telling. A birth card names a calendar day in a 52-card year. It does not forecast prizes, character, or fate.

Where do Benjamin List's dates come from?

Birth date 1968-01-11 is the Nobel Prize API v2.1 day-precision date, verified against Wikidata P569 (CC0, day precision, Gregorian preferred). The two sources match. Year-only Nobel dates and Nobel↔Wikidata conflicts are dropped, not guessed. Page hooks and evidence come from the Wikipedia REST summary (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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