You have to hand it to Google. They get pretty creative with their Google Doodles. Sometimes, the real creativity is in the actual doodle itself. Lately they’ve been putting out some pretty cool ones with animations and different interactive elements. Sometimes, however, the creativity lies in simply deciding when to run a doodle.

For example, who would have expected Google to mark the occasion of the 118th birthday of the man who discovered Vitamin C? Don’t raise your hand if you don’t work at or with Google, because I won’t believe you.

That’s what they have done today. It’s the 118th birthday of Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, a Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937. He is credited with the discovery of vitamin C and the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle. NobelPrize.org has a nice bio of him.

He died in 1986 at the age of 93.

Consider just how important vitamin C is, and you might say to yourself, “Yes, this guy absolutely deserves a Google doodle.” But would it have ever occurred to you if Google didn’t do it?

It’s always nice to see the artistic creativity that goes into Google’s doodles. And today’s is nice visually, but often the coolest thing about Google doodles is simply the education they can deliver. Think about how many more people will know who Albert Szent-Gyorgyi is now because Google changed its logo today. How many people will click on that doodle out of curiosity and learn something new? And something worth knowing at that.

This week, comScore reported that 65.09% of all U.S. searches are Google searches. They’re not all from the Google home page, but considering that Americans conducted nearly 20 Billion core searches in August, I think it’s safe to say that a lot of people see Google’s doodles.

In that spirit of learning about vitamin C, here are some charts showing the amount of vitamin C in various plants and animals (via Wikipedia):