Sally Kornbluth, the 18th president of MIT, speaks with Boston Magazine reporter Jonathan Soroff about why she is excited to lead MIT, Smoots, Boston weather and sports, and how to encourage more girls and women to pursue STEM careers.
The life and legacy of Prof. Michael Dertouzos, who was “renowned for making complicated technology accessible to the general public,” is celebrated in a new Google doodle, reports Helen Rogers for CNN. Rogers notes that Dertouzos “predicted how the internet and the rise of personal computers would impact people's lives.”
Prof. Craig Steven Wilder and archivist Nora Murphy speak with Heather Goldstone of Living Lab Radio on WCAI about a new undergraduate course to research MIT’s historical ties to slavery. “The story of MIT also tells us about the centrality of slavery to the United States economy and to the rise of the United States as we know it,” says Wilder.
After being charged by MIT’s president to investigate the Institute’s ties to slavery, Prof. Craig Wilder led a new class that “uncovered myriad connections… some blatant and others nuanced,” reports Laura Krantz for The Boston Globe. SHASS Dean Melissa Nobles says it’s important to study MIT’s role in post-Civil War Reconstruction: “At the end of day, MIT is about ideas. It’s about better understanding human knowledge and advancing it. And one way we advance it is by understanding its origins.”
In an article for Times Higher Education, Anna Gast, president of Imperial College London, praises former MIT presidents, Vannevar Bush and Charles Vest, for their willingness to “advocate for the importance of fundamental research and the need for government support of it.”
In an article for Forbes, Jimmy Soni highlights some of the late MIT Prof. Claude Shannon’s most important contributions to math and technology. Soni notes that Shannon is known as the “father of the information age” thanks to his work “in the 1930s and 1940s that helped to lay the groundwork for the digital world we live in.”
In an article for The New York Times, Maria Konnikova writes that in his new book, Tim Hartford cites MIT’s Building 20 as an example of how autonomy and flexibility can inspire creativity and new innovations. Konnikova writes that Building 20 “gave rise to some of the best ideas of the 20th century.”
Boston Globe reporter Eric Moskowitz chronicles the life and work of Prof. Emeritus Rainer Weiss, from his childhood passion for tinkering with radios to the decades he spent dedicated to the search for gravitational waves. Kip Thorne, a professor at Caltech, remarks that Weiss “really is, by a large margin, the most influential person this field has seen.”
Katie Peek revisits an article from the March 1949 edition of Popular Science about a solar-powered house developed by MIT researchers. The house was designed to channel the “sun’s warmth to the sodium-sulfate tanks, which meted out heat on cold or overcast days.”
A slideshow compiled by Boston.com highlights “some of the faces and places” from MIT’s history. The slideshow features historic images of campus, research projects, sporting and student events, and more.
Nidhi Subbaraman of BetaBoston writes about the symposium held in honor of the 100th anniversary of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, highlighting SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s talk. Musk said that investment in becoming a “multi-planet” species is crucial to the future of humanity.