Big Names on Campus

In 1916, when MIT’s majestic Cambridge campus opened, the buildings surrounding its Great Court (now called Killian Court) were inscribed with the names of men who’d made notable contributions to science and technology.

A century later, MIT celebrated the centennial of its move from Boston to Cambridge. During the 2016 festivities, we decided to look at the names carved into those buildings with fresh eyes and consider whether things might be done differently if the campus were being built today.

To make one thing clear: every name that was carved into the “original group” of buildings belongs there. Some of the names – Leonardo, Copernicus, Archimedes – are so famous that there’s nearly nothing new to be said about them. And the less well-known names in Killian Court, too, have earned the immortality that goes with being carved in stone.

Still, from our vantage point in 2016 we were aware of a large number of 20th century individuals whose names would clearly be competitive for inclusion if the stone carving were taking place today. We could also identify many people from earlier centuries whose names really ought to have been considered for inclusion back in 1916.

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Ada Augusta King, Countess of Lovelace, may be the most widely-recognized name associated with the history of women in STEM. An important programming language developed for the U.S. Department of Defense is named in her honor. So is Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration that’s held every year on the second Tuesday in October. Ada Lovelace is a Big Name indeed.

Her father was the Romantic poet Lord Byron. Her mother Annabelle was a much more disciplined individual, and Ada received a good education at home. In her nineteenth year Ada became serious about mathematics and science and immersed herself in more advanced studies. Happily, her mentor was Mary Somerville, who was the leading woman scientist of the day (in fact she is the person for whom the word “scientist” was coined). Through Somerville, Ada would meet Charles Babbage, whose proposed “analytical engine” sparked her interest.

An article on Babbage’s machine was published in a French journal in 1842. Ada produced an English-language version of the article but did not stop at mere translation. To the 26-page “Sketch of the Analytical Engine” she appended 41 pages of her own “Notes” that included what is now recognized as the first computer program.

Ada’s translation-with-notes was her only solo publication, but it’s a major landmark in the history of science publishing. When it initially appeared in 1843 in volume three of Scientific Memoirs, Ada’s full name was not given. Instead, each of her famous “Notes” was signed with the initials “A.A.L.” (for Ada Augusta Lovelace). Fun fact from MIT’s Rare Books Program: Ada’s most celebrated piece of writing – the groundbreaking “Note G” that comprises the world’s first computer program – concludes with the author’s initials misprinted as “A.L.L.”

For millennia, humans have been fascinated by static electricity – the tendency of a particular substance to attract other, more lightweight materials. Ancient Greeks noticed that if they rubbed a piece of amber, for example, it caused other objects, such as feathers or pieces of lint, to move toward it and stick to its surface. But the phenomenon wasn’t understood at all.

In 1600 William Gilbert distinguished between the attractive power of the magnet, and the seemingly identical phenomenon of static electricity. This was a crucially important distinction, but serious study of electricity remained difficult because of the weak and fleeting nature of a static charge.

The development of the friction machine (to produce electrical charges on demand) in the 17th century, and the Leyden jar (to store charges) in the century that followed, were major leaps forward that ushered in periods of increased experimental activity.

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Margaret Cavendish made sure that her name was gigantic during her lifetime. Unfortunately, although “Cavendish” does appear among the Big Names in Killian Court, it refers to her distant relative Henry Cavendish, known for his role in identifying hydrogen.

Unlike most female natural philosophers of the seventeenth century, Margaret Cavendish left behind a substantial body of printed works, among them ruminations on natural philosophy and what may be the first utopian science fiction novel. She repeatedly and deliberately placed herself in the public eye, creating a specific image of herself as a learned woman. Arguably, she was able to do this because of her position as Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne: she carried on exactly as she wished and dared anyone to speak against her.

But this didn’t mean nothing was said about her: she was often the object of gossip, and was generally considered not quite proper. Cavendish’s writings reveal a keen awareness of how she was perceived by others. Her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, for example, begin with a sly note that while people might say “that my much writing is a disease … the best Philosophers … have been grievously sick” with the same illness.

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Huygens’ most famous achievement is the invention of the pendulum clock. Like many seventeenth-century natural philosophers, though, he had multifaceted interests – in addition to clocks, they included telescopes, optics, astronomy, mathematics, and probability. He worked and lived on the beneficence of patrons: first his father and then Louis XIV (through the newly-founded Académie Royale des Sciences), as was common for natural philosophers at the time.

Huygens’ father was friends with Galileo and Descartes, so it’s unsurprising that he placed a high priority on giving Christiaan and his brother the best possible education. His father supported him financially for more than half his life so that Huygens could pursue his philosophical interests rather than following the family tradition of diplomacy. During this period, Huygens invented the pendulum clock, studied probability, and made the first recorded observations of Saturn’s moon Titan.

When the Académie Royale des Sciences was founded in 1666, Huygens became a member and moved from The Hague, which at the time was part of the Dutch Republic, to Paris, where he spent most of the remainder of his life. Huygens dedicated his next book (1673’s Horologium Oscillatorium) to King Louis XIV, creator and royal patron of the Académie. Many natural philosophers and scientists have devoted works to their patrons over the centuries, but Huygens’ support for the French king was especially loaded, since France was then at war with the Dutch Republic.

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As with so many women who’ve excelled in the sciences, Hertha Ayrton’s success did not come easy. One of eight children in a poor family, by age 16 she was working as a governess and sending money home to support her widowed mother and her siblings. But she’d received several years of schooling courtesy of a sympathetic aunt, and was so gifted that when she took the Cambridge University Examination for Women at age twenty she scored honors in English and math.

With financial help from a leading suffragist, she was able to attend Girton College where she completed their course of study in math; from there she went to the Finsbury Technical College in London. Her interests were varied and over the course of her lifetime she would hold 26 patents for everything from an improved movie projector to implements for the British military.

But her greatest success came via her work in resolving the serious challenges posed by electric lighting which, though it was still a developing technology in the 1890s, was becoming hugely important across the globe. Direct-current arc lights were in wide use, but they were beset with problems. Ayrton accomplished what others apparently could not: she analyzed the electric arc from every important angle, and began publishing her work around the age of forty. In 1899 she read a landmark paper at the Institution of Electrical Engineers. The IEE was suitably impressed and that same year, made her its first female member.

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In mathematics and in physics, it’s hard to avoid Euler. His name endures: “Euler’s identity” may be the most famous instance of his surname’s ubiquity, but there are also Euler numbers in several fields, along with multiple functions, formulas, equations, laws, and theorems that bear his name.

Given his subsequent fame, it may not be surprising to learn that Euler first applied for a professorship at the age of twenty. While he didn’t get that job, he did become an adjunct at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences soon afterward. He worked throughout his life on mathematical and physical problems; he taught and wrote. And he maintained correspondence with a wide network of other scientists (including d’Alembert, Bernoulli, Lagrange, and Laplace). In fact, he often distributed his work first through that very avenue – a forerunner, of sorts, to today’s conference or pre-print systems.

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The first woman who is known to have taught mathematics and philosophy to men, Hypatia is probably the most famous ancient female scholar. Born in Alexandria, she was daughter to the mathematician Theon. Her father was not her only teacher; she studied under Plutarch the Younger as well.

With her father, Hypatia produced commentaries on Ptolemy, along with a definitive edition of the Elements of Euclid. She devised her own astrolabes and a hydroscope. Hypatia was hailed as a lecturer and – astonishingly for a woman in the fifth century – eventually headed the great Neoplatonist school of Alexandria. But sadly none of Hypatia’s own writings have survived. What is known about her has been gleaned from the writings of others, including Synesius of Cyrene. 

One of Hypatia’s most notable students, Synesius went on to become a Bishop in the relatively early days of Christianity. The first printed volume of his works includes Synesius’ letters (“Synesiou Epistolai”), some of which are addressed to Hypatia. In an apparent show of respect for his revered mentor, Synesius always addresses her as “The Philosopher Hypatia.”

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Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban, more or less invented the scientific method. For that reason, he’s an appropriate figure for us to celebrate during this first week of classes in MIT’s fall semester, in the hundredth year after the Institute moved across the Charles.

It can be difficult to detail Bacon’s contributions to science from the vantage of the twenty-first century. He became interested in natural philosophy in his 30s and over the next several decades wrote works intended to transform it into a more systematic, experiment-based pursuit. His political career made sustained periods of investigation difficult, but by 1620 he had one volume of his Instauratio magna – “Great Instaturation” – ready for publication. Although his plan was for the Instauratio magna to comprise six volumes in all, he died before completing any of the others. What Bacon did complete is now usually referred to by that volume’s title, Novum organum scientiarum (‘New instrument of science’).

While Bacon’s methods (and many of Bacon’s results) do not always reflect the scientific method as we know it today, and though he was certainly not the only person to contribute to the scientific method’s development, his Novum organum undoubtedly forms the bedrock of science as a discipline.

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In the century since MIT’s Killian Court was constructed, many things have changed, both in society and in the sciences. One of the most important developments in science, quantum mechanics, was barely getting started in 1916. By that point Einstein had established the principles of the photoelectric effect and Bohr had figured out why hydrogen produced specific spectral lines, but nobody truly theorized quantum mechanics until the 1920s and 30s. By definition, no one involved in quantum could have had their name carved into the walls of the original Court.

Within the field of quantum mechanics, there are plenty of Big Names to choose from: Heisenberg, Schrödinger, de Broglie, Einstein and Bohr … and Dirac. Dirac’s work reconciling quantum mechanics – as established by all these other big names – with Einstein’s special relativity, along with his re-formulation of quantum into linear algebra terms, moved the discipline forward in a major way. The reconciliation with special relativity also led Dirac to posit the existence of antiparticles such as the positron, a prediction that was experimentally verified in the 1930s.

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Physicist, mathematician, and philosophe Jean le Rond d'Alembert found fame in disparate realms. He earned his bachelor’s degree at eighteen and then studied law for a period, but his calling was in mathematics and physics. He wrote several important works on those topics, and his first book, Traité de dynamique, introduced a concept concerning motion that continues to carry his name: the d'Alembert Principle. He wrote on music, literature, and philosophy as well.

But it was as a co-editor, with Denis Diderot, of the magnificent Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers that d'Alembert made his greatest impact. Published over the course of more than two decades, the Encyclopédie, with its plates and supplements, comprises the defining work of the Enlightenment and marks one of history’s greatest publishing events.

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Certain scientists have had discoveries, theorems and laws named for them, and that’s both an honor and an acknowledgement of singular achievement. But there are some truly great figures in the history of science whose work is widely applied, cited, and learned by every student in their discipline with no name attached – precisely because the work is so foundational to the field.

We’ll never know how Rudolf Julius Emmanuel Clausius would feel about his work having been divorced from his name despite its importance. He first identified the concept of entropy in an 1865 article in Annalen der Physik that concludes with the first two laws of thermodynamics, formulated in almost exactly the same terms we use today. The first law – “Die Energie der Welt ist constant” (or in modern English terms, "energy cannot be created or destroyed”) – had been conceptualized earlier. The second – “Die Entropie der Welt strebt einem Maximum zu” ("entropy tends to increase”) – was Clausius’ own creation.

More laws of thermodynamics followed. However, the numbering Clausius established has never been revised: his first two laws have been supplemented with a third and a “zeroth.”

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The word “tragic” is badly overused, but it’s difficult to find a satisfactory substitute for it when the topic is Alice Ball’s brief life. Born in Seattle, she graduated from the University of Washington in 1914. That same year she and a professor co-authored a paper that was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

One year later she had earned her master’s degree in chemistry from what is now the University of Hawaii. In doing so, she became the first woman – and the first African American – to receive an advanced degree from that institution.

Kalawao, on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, had long served as an area where people stricken with Hansen’s disease, then commonly called leprosy, were quarantined. For centuries, those suffering with Hansen’s lived with no hope of treatment. Newly-minted chemist Alice Ball, undaunted, devised a way to administer a compound that provided relief from some of the disease’s worst symptoms.

But an accident, apparently involving chlorine gas, occurred while she was teaching a class, and led to her death. Alice Ball died before learning that her research had resulted in the first effective treatment for Hansen’s disease, a treatment that would be in use for decades.

A century after her death, we can only wonder what Alice Ball might have done over the course of a full lifespan, given what she accomplished during the scant 24 years she was alive.

When you hear the name Newton, you think of physics, mathematics … and alchemy? In fact, Newton produced a significant body of alchemical work, and while it may seem incongruous in the 21st century, these areas of study were not diametrically opposed in Newton’s day.

Newton spent a significant portion of his life at Cambridge University, first as a student and then as a fellow. But he came up with the seeds of his most revolutionary scientific and mathematical ideas while the university was closed due to plague during the years 1665-1666, providing if nothing else a powerful argument for term breaks and sabbaticals. In subsequent years he worked on developing his ideas more fully while beginning his exploration of alchemy. Although alchemy was not unheard of within the walls of Cambridge and Oxford, it was practiced by people of all classes and walks of life in Europe, intersecting with theological thought, scientific practice, historical inquiry, and, admittedly, a certain amount of Orientalism.

Arguably, alchemy intersected with all of these even in Newton’s own work. His handwritten translation of the Book of Nicholas Flamel, owned by the MIT Libraries, details the supposed ‘hieroglyphical’ symbolism embedded in paintings on the Church of the SS. Innocents in Paris (which was torn down in the eighteenth century). According to Flamel, via Newton, these symbols  – including a winged lion, St. Peter, and even dragons – explain the procedure for creating the Philosopher’s Stone, if you know how to read them.

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Ernest Everett Just was a cell biologist. When he graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth in 1907 he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and went on to earn his PhD at the University of Chicago. Just worked as a professor of biology and as a department head, and was recognized as an outstanding researcher and theorist, credited with significant discoveries. In close association with the pioneering embryologist Frank R. Lillie, he spent 19 summers doing research at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. He presented papers at major scientific conferences, published numerous articles, and wrote two books, one of which – The Biology of the Cell Surface – was the definitive text in its field for years. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography notes that, among other achievements, Just was “the first to associate cell surface changes with stages of embryonic development experimentally.” His contributions to embryology and cell biology were lasting and important.

But in his fifties, Just left the United States for Europe, with the intention of remaining there permanently. As an African American scientist, he was exhausted by the roadblocks that had been thrown in his way both personally and professionally during his entire lifetime. Grants and research funding that should have been available to a scientist with his record of accomplishment simply were not awarded to him. He was made to feel unwelcome at conferences and scientific gatherings despite the quality of his presentations. And of course his achievements provided no protection whatsoever from the indignities – sometimes petty, often major – that were a part of the daily life of every person of color in America during his lifetime.

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