Science Sunday: June 12: Wolowitz
This week's Science Sunday is dedicated to Howard Wolowitz. Yeah, he's skeevey, but you have to love him anyway.
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Although Howard is the only one of the guys without a Ph.D, he proudly boasts of his Master's Degree from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The establishment of MIT was a slow process. The Massachusetts State Legislator approved a museum and Conservatory of Art and Science by 1859. In 1861, the Common Wealth of Massachusetts authored the incorporation of "Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston Society of Natural History", submitted by William Barton Rogers, who sought to establish a new form of higher education to address advancements in science and technology. MIT's first classes were held in a rented space in 1865.
MIT is a non-profit organization and is owned and governed by a board of trustees. The current board seats 74 members from the fields of scientific, engineering, industry, education, and public service. It has five schools - Science, Engineering, Architecture and Planning, Management, and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences - and one college - Whitaker College of Health Sciences and Technology. The most popular department is Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT's School of Engineering has the following graduate departments:
o Aeronautics and Astronautics
o Biological Engineering
o Chemical Engineering
o Civil and Environmental Engineering
o Computation for Design and Optimization
o Computational and Systems Biology
o Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
o Engineering Systems
o Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology
o Leaders for Global Operations
o Materials Science and Engineering
o Mechanical Engineering
o Nuclear Science and Engineering
o Polymer Science and Technology
o System Design and Management
Of these departments, it's unclear which Wolowitz graduated from, but it seems likely that it was either Aeronautics and Astronautics or Mechanical Engineering, as both involve some amount robotics in space.
For more about MIT's history, review this site. Further information on the Aeronautics and Astronautics department here, the Mechanical Engineering department here.
IN HONOR OF WOLOWITZ: ENGINEERING PICK-UP LINES
Let's take each other to the limit to see if we converge.
My love for you is a monotonically increasing unbounded function.
By looking at you I can tell you're 36-25-36, which by the way are all perfect squares.
I wish I was your second derivative so I could investigate your concavities.
I wish I was your problem set, because then I'd be really hard, and you'd be doing me on the desk.
I'll take you to the limit as x approaches infinity.
I know the spring constant for my mattress. Wanna take some data?
That dress would look even better accelerating towards my bedroom floor at 9.8 m/s^2
I would really like to bisect your angle.
The volume of a generalized cylinder has been known for thousands of years, but you won’t know the volume of mine until tonight.
Archimedes cried out “eureka” and ran around naked and filled with joy when he discovered that the volume of a solid can be determined by how much it displaces. Spend more time with me and you will do the same.
Nice set of parabolas!
I'd like to get you under your fume hood!
I'd like to demonstrate with you simple harmonic motion.
Your body has the nicest arc length I've ever seen.
Why don't we measure the coefficient of static friction between me and you?
You and I would add up better than a Riemann sum.
Let's convert our potential energy to kinetic energy.
My love for you is like a concave up function because it is always increasing.
I wish I were your derivative so I could lie tangent to your curves.
I like the area bounded by your two curves.
OTHER
Engineering: Fun Facts