At the sod-turning for the Nobel Plaza, Dr. Agnes Herzberg, daughter of Dr. Gerhard Herzberg, one of the two Nobel laureates (the other being Dr. Henry Taube) after whom the pedestrian concourse is being named , spoke to the Convocation audience gathered outside about her father's remembrances of the University of Saskatchewan.

Bio/Historical Note: Dr. Agnes Margaret Herzberg, born in Saskatoon, is a Canadian statistician and professor emerita of mathematics and statistics at Queen's University. She was president of the Statistical Society of Canada for 1991–1992, its first female president. Dr. Herzberg did her undergraduate studies at Queen's University before earning an MA and a PhD from the University of Saskatchewan. She took an Overseas Fellowship in 1966, taking her to England, and remained at Imperial College London until 1988, when she returned to Queen's as a professor. In 1983 Dr. Herzberg was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1983. She became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1990. She is also a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. In 1999 the Statistical Society of Canada gave Dr. Herzberg their Distinguished Service Award, the first to a woman, and in 2007 the society named her as an Honourary Member "for fundamental contributions to the design of experiments, applied statistics and data analysis; for her organization and leadership of conferences on statistics, science and public policy, and for dedicated service to the international statistical community”. Additionally, a conference in her honour was held at Queen's University in 2004. Beyond her work in statistics, Dr. Herzberg has also used graph coloring and chromatic polynomials to analyze the mathematics of Sudoku. Dr. Herzberg is the daughter of Dr. Luise Herzberg, astrophysicist, and Dr. Gerhard Herzberg, Nobel Prize-winning physicist. She was awarded an honourary Doctor of Laws degree from the U of S in 2018. Dr. Herzberg is professor emerita of mathematics and statistics at Queen’s University (2022).

Bio/Historical Note: The Nobel Plaza honouring the two Nobel laureates with University of Saskatchewan connections was officially opened on 24 October 1997. The $200,000 Plaza was sponsored by the Meewasin Authority and Meewasin Foundation and presented as a gift to recognize the university’s 90th birthday. Two bronze plaques honour Henry Taube (BSc. 1935, MSc. 1937), who was a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry in 1983 when affiliated with Stanford University, and Gerhard Herzberg, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1971. He had an illustrious career with the National Research Council, Ottawa. The Plaza is attached to the main exit from the building and the Bowl and consists of a pedestrian concourse with a stone clad speaker’s podium faced with the two bronze plaques.