Welcome to Madison
The City
Downtown Madison sits on an isthmus half a mile wide, squeezed between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona. Everything had to be built on that strip. It is why the Capitol, the university, the best restaurants and this convention centre are all within walking distance of each other.
People have lived here for 12,000 years. The Ho-Chunk call it Teejop, land of the four lakes. The effigy mounds they built over a thousand years ago are still in the ground, several of them on the campus you can walk through this week.
In 1829 a judge named James Duane Doty bought a thousand acres of swamp on the isthmus. In 1836 he handed buffalo robes to freezing legislators and discounted lots to undecided ones, and they voted to make his city the capital. It had no residents. It existed only on paper. He named the streets after the signers of the Constitution, which is why you will walk Pinckney, Carroll, Mifflin and Langdon this week without noticing.
Locals call it Madtown. Also, with affection, seventy-seven square miles surrounded by reality.
sights of madison
Madison Sights and Culture
Tasting Madison
Madison Classics
Tasting Madison
New and Upcoming
Support Madison
Madison Co-ops and businesses
Madison's role in Science and Culture
SCIENCE, OUT OF ONE SQUARE MILE
Har Gobind Khorana. Born in a Punjab village, came to Madison in 1960, cracked how the genetic code is read and written. Nobel Prize, 1968. The Khorana Program still sends students between Indian research institutes and this university in his name.
Howard Temin. Told for years he was wrong. He found reverse transcriptase, won the Nobel in 1975, and handed the world the key it would need a decade later to understand HIV.
John Bardeen. Born and raised in Madison. The only person ever to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, once for the transistor. The device you are reading this on exists because of it.
Steenbock, Link and WARF. Vitamin D in milk ended rickets as a childhood epidemic. A mystery cattle disease became warfarin. The foundation that funded both now returns over $100 million a year to the university.
James Thomson. Derived the first human embryonic stem cell lines here in 1998, opening a field and an argument that are both still unfolding.
CULTURE
Thornton Wilder was born in Madison in 1897, and remains the only person to win Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and drama. Our Town was written by a Madison boy.
Clyde Stubblefield, James Brown's drummer, played the four bars that became the most sampled break in recorded history. He lived in Madison for forty years and played small clubs the whole time.
Butch Vig produced Nirvana's Nevermind and then formed Garbage, much of it out of Smart Studios, an unglamorous building on East Washington Avenue a few minutes from here.
Chris Farley grew up in Madison. Georgia O'Keeffe was born twenty minutes east in Sun Prairie. Frank Lloyd Wright trained at this university and is buried forty miles west.
