The MIT factor

I was at MIT in 1962, straight out of IIT, Kharagpur. In the one year that I was there, I was able to get a Masters degree and work with some of the brightest minds in a consultancy company set up by three MIT professors ( one of whom recruited me) to help NASA solve problems that nobody else could solve.

It was a learning experience that I never forgot.

And this article on the MIT factor- 150 years of maverick genius- captures perfectly the ambience and spirit of MIT.

"People often asked me to compare the quality of education that I had received at IIT Kharagpur, MIT and at Berkeley.(Straight from the heart) I would tell them that the IIT education provided the best grounding an engineer could hope to have, with its rigor and sheer hard work. It taught us that all problems have a solution if the fundamentals are sound. MIT, on the other hand, taught me how to think. Perhaps one episode from my Cambridge days would encapsulate this best.

During the summer vacations, I was asked by one of my professors to work in his consulting company. Simpson, Gumpertz and Heger was a consulting company formed by a group of three MIT professors to be advisers to NASA, which was preparing to land a man on the moon. They were set up to solve problems that NASA’s own experts could not. One of my first assignments was to work on the design of a model test for the project Apollo module as it headed to the moon. We needed to simulate the dynamics of the module as its weight and pull changed in its journey to the moon due to its consumption of fuel. NASA was waiting for our recommendations, but I was stuck and for two weeks could seem to find no solution to the problem. I decided to go to Dr Simpson, the head of the company, to tell him that he had better allocate this work to someone more competent. Dr. Simpson was to teach me a lesson that has stayed with me all my life.

“Do you think this problem has an answer?” he asked me.

“Yes” I replied. “There has to be an answer, but I have researched all the relevant books and articles and found no answers in them.”

“Well,” he smiled, “that is because this answer has not yet been found. When we founded this company, it was to work on problems that nobody else could solve. That is why NASA sends all their complex problems to us.”

“You will not,” he continued, “find the answer in any book or article. Rather, when you find the answer, you will be the one writing the article or the book.”

“Do not,” he added, “assume that someone somewhere else knows the answer. You must find it yourself, starting from first principles. You are, after all, the graduate of the finest engineering school in the world and we have picked you as one of the best in your batch. So go back and find the answer and see me next week.”

I went back, filled with renewed purpose, and over the next week met many experts to try and search for the elusive answer. And just as Dr Simpson had predicted, it was there and I did find it.

The education at Berkeley education was similar to that at MIT but with a difference. If MIT taught you to think, Berkeley taught you to think creatively and, in today’s parlance, “out of the box.” It taught you how to take knowledge and your understanding of it to create new knowledge. In the summer of 1967, I was spending my summer working as a research assistant to Professor Penzien. He had just been given an assignment to ensure that the latest multi storied building in San Francisco, the Alcoa Building, could withstand an earthquake. Of course, the designers of the building had already analyzed the structure but the owners wanted to make sure that it would withstand an earthquake which San Francisco expected in the near future. We wondered what we could do beyond the analysis that had already been done.

“Let’s shake the building,” said Joe Penzien, “and see how it will really react during an earthquake”.

“Shake the building”, I thought, “How does one shake a forty story building which was already constructed to find out what would happen during an earthquake?”

But that was exactly what we proceeded to do. We found a machine that had been recently invented by another University of California professor which rotated two weights counterclockwise and which could be calibrated to induce a horizontal force. We installed this machine floor by floor and shook the building, measuring the response on each of the other floors, using accelerometers. We could then combine the individual waves to simulate the earthquake and thus determine how the entire building would perform during the intense movement of the earthquake. It was an interesting and creative approach to a problem that many in the industry had left only to computer analysis.

I was fortunate to have been trained at all the three schools but it was only much later that I realized what and how much I had learnt!"