TheUrgencyofDoing:MITandtheSpiritofLeonardodaVinciBySusanHockfield
2018-09-04 16:04阅读：
The Urgency of Doing: MIT and the Spirit of Leonardo da Vinci
By Susan Hockfield, 16th President of MIT(2004-2012)
Freshman Convocation 2008
Good morning, and welcome, MIT class of 2012. Welcome also to your
friends and family who have come to see you off, as you begin your
MIT adventure.
Let me start by explaining the purpose of this Convocation. From
the Latin, ”Convocation” means, literally, a “calling together.”
Given the uncontainable energy of any group of 1,000 MIT students,
we don’t get to call you together very often. Frankly, we start
your careers here this way because it is virtually the last time we
can call you together, until you come together again to receive
your degrees in four very short years from now. However, now that
we’ve insisted on your attention, I hope to use it well, to give
you a sense of the character and spirit that define MIT, and to
sneak in a little advice along the way.
The calendar of the college admissions process means that we h
ave, for some fairly long part of this past year, kept you in
suspense, and then had the great joy of offering each of you an
invitation to enroll at MIT. It’s unlikely to be news to any of you
that we admitted fewer than 12% of those who applied to MIT last
year. Based on that statistic alone, you may feel lucky to be part
of this class. Let me reverse the perspective for a moment to be
very clear about how we feel about you: it is MIT’s very good
fortune that you decided to join us. What you bring to MIT is
partly individual: your own intellect, energy, ideas and
aspirations; your distinctive life experience and point of view;
your language, your culture, and your faith; your imagination and
your sense of humor. In addition to each of your individual gifts,
together you represent the start of a marvelous new chapter in the
history of human understanding, and it happens that we’ve gathered
in an unusually interesting place to think about that idea.
We sit this morning in the grand, grassy space of Killian Court.
The surrounding “Bosworth Buildings,” also called the Main Group,
magnificently embrace Killian Court. Together, this space and these
buildings represent the geographic and symbolic center of our
campus. Perhaps as important, these great buildings are also a
monument to the persistent power of human inquiry, a physical
representation of the stone-by-stone development of humankind’s
understanding of the world. Look up at the frieze on the buildings
nearest the river, and you will see a carved band of names – giants
of science and philosophy; mathematics and medicine; architecture,
art and engineering. Aristotle and Archimedes. Newton and Franklin.
Darwin and Pasteur. Names that mark the miles on the rising road of
understanding that led to the modern world. Towering there, those
names may seem intimidating, abstract, distant. Some in smaller
print are embarrassingly obscure. All are decidedly dead. And
certainly, the list is incomplete – starkly white, male and
Western. For a host of reasons, then, aren’t these intellectual
ghosts irrelevant to who you are and why you’re here today?
Absolutely not. Because all of them opened new chapters in their
lives – just like you. They were crazy about math and science,
engineering and design, art and philosophy – just like you. And
they were hopeful and ambitious and uncontrollably curious – just
like you. And even if we cannot all become intellectual giants, we
can each add our own stone to the incredible, inspiring, rising
edifice of human understanding – just as they did.
I want to bring one name down from that frieze today, as a way of
telling you a little about the remarkable history you inherit, and
about MIT. Leonardo da Vinci’s name is among the most familiar.
You’ll find it on Building 1, on the western side in the area
occupied by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Da Vinci lived 500 years ago, from 1452 to 1519. Imagine leaving
work behind that would inspire awe and scholarship in 2508! Da
Vinci was an illegitimate child with very little formal schooling.
No one would have expected anything of him in particular. But from
decidedly modest beginnings, he built a life of almost
incomprehensible achievement.
Some think of him mainly as a painter, one of the two or three
masters who defined the highest artistic achievement of the Italian
Renaissance, the most celebrated period in all of Western Art. Yet
painting was not how he spent most of his time. Da Vinci worked as
a scientist and engineer; a sculptor and inventor; a city planner
and architect. The wide range of his interests and talents suggests
an embodiment of the ideal of a university, especially this
university.
Let me describe for you three of his characteristics that
profoundly resonate with MIT. First was da Vinci’s complete
disregard for the accepted boundaries between different fields of
knowledge. Everything he did fed everything else, interconnecting
disparate perspectives. Today, we dress up that attitude with an
awkward phrase, “multidisciplinary thinking,” but for da Vinci, it
was nothing more than his ravenous curiosity, his desire to explore
everything, to explain everything, and to put to use everything he
learned.
As a scientist, he made painstakingly precise observations of human
anatomy, of geology, of the structure of trees, and of the physical
properties of water and light. He drew, recorded, calculated
forces, speculated about causes, and experimented over and over to
test his ideas. In turn, those studies – that deep knowledge of his
subjects – made his paintings leap off the canvas with life, every
muscle, every hillside, every storm-tossed tree vivid and
intoxicatingly real. At the same time, his incredible ability to
draw – to think and render in three dimensions – actually made it
possible for him to invent, describe and communicate engineering
ideas that were unimaginable before. As an anatomist, he used these
methods to diagram the skull and its relation to the brain. As an
engineer, he used his scientific grasp of fluid dynamics and
geology to design stunningly original canals and bridges. But he
also used his engineering knowledge of sediment and flow to
perceive, in Tuscany’s stratified, tumbling rock formations, a
frozen image of violent, fluid motion – an intuitive leap that
presaged, five centuries in advance, today’s science of plate
tectonics. In the same way, much of the most exciting work at MIT
is happening at the intersections between disciplines: Where cancer
biology merges spectacularly with physics, computer science and
nanoscale engineering. Where climate science and the demand for new
energy sources collaborate creatively with economics, political
science, history and the practical realities of architecture and
the business world. Where neuroscience crosses into artificial
intelligence, philosophy and linguistics. Here at MIT, each of you
will find the joy and power of mastering a given field – the
discipline of knowing your discipline. But I hope that you will
also pursue your boundless curiosity well beyond those boundaries,
because from there you may encounter new ideas and fresh
perspectives that could take you beyond what has been found
before.
The second facet of da Vinci’s character that aligns with MIT is
his respect for and fascination with nature, both as a scientist
and an engineer. As he wrote in his notebooks, “Human ingenuity …
will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple,
nor more to the purpose than Nature does, because in her inventions
nothing is wanting, and nothing is superfluous.”
Contemporary society has a way of separating us from Nature in our
daily lives. But here at MIT, you will find a great many engineers
and scientists who treat Nature as their prime collaborator. One
example is Angela Belcher, Germeshausen Professor of Materials
Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering, and a MacArthur
fellow, among many other honors. Early in her studies, she marveled
at how abalone, a common mollusk, makes its shell. By adding
nothing but some proteins, the abalone transforms calcium carbonate
– simple chalk, a structurally weak compound – into an intricately
structured material 3,000 times stronger than chalk. And the
abalone performs this feat at normal earth temperatures and
pressures, with no toxic by-products. So Professor Belcher asked,
if nature could “self-assemble” such an extraordinary structure out
of such simple ingredients under such benign conditions, why
couldn’t we tap those natural mechanisms to devise new materials of
our own? As she and her colleagues have now proven in many
contexts, we can. For instance, they’ve engineered benign viruses
to self-assemble into a battery: a clear, non-toxic film with the
potential to coat whatever object needs power, such as a cell
phone.
For da Vinci, the simplicity he appreciated in nature became his
ultimate standard in design. And as you’ll discover here, from
robotics to aeronautics, computer science to mechanical
engineering, simplicity in design is also “very MIT.” In fact, Amy
Smith, in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, recently
published seven rules that guide her work in designing technologies
for communities in the developing world, from grain mills to
incubators. Her third rule quotes da Vinci himself: “Simplicity is
the ultimate sophistication.”
The third quality of da Vinci’s character that informs our work at
MIT is an irrepressible demand for hands-on making, designing,
practicing and testing, and for solving problems in the real world.
The inventions he sketched range from the first adjustable wrench,
to machines for making nails and minting uniform coins, to
fortified wagons, steam cannons and temporary bridges for warfare.
His fascination for tackling practical problems echoes the central
mission of MIT: to bring “knowledge to bear on the world’s great
challenges,” an assignment that MIT has pursued with remarkable
results, from developing radar during World War II, to developing
standards for the World Wide Web today. Da Vinci even taught the
students in his workshop to follow the principle of demonstration –
the same commitment to learning-by doing that will define your MIT
education. As he wrote, “I have been impressed with the urgency of
doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply.”
That same spirit animates much of our work at MIT. You see it in
the ingenious modular houses that Professor of Architecture
Lawrence Sass designed as an affordable and attractive way to
restore the devastated neighborhoods of New Orleans: whole houses
whose construction requires only a mallet to assemble the
digitally-designed, friction-fit, interlocking pieces. You can
actually see one of these houses, now on display at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York City. You also see “the urgency of doing” in
the innovative batteries that Professor Yet-Ming Chiang has created
for the next generation of electric cars, a topic you’ll hear more
about in his lecture on Tuesday. That “urgency of doing” also
drives every aspect of the MIT Energy Initiative, or MITEI, an
expansive, Institute-wide initiative to tackle what may well be the
most pressing challenge of our time.
Five hundred years after da Vinci first taught all these lessons –
with his multidisciplinary curiosity, his admiration for nature’s
economy of design and his irrepressible passion for solving
problems – he remains an intriguing teacher. You will also
encounter a great many extraordinary teachers at MIT, perhaps the
most invigorating minds and inspiring mentors you’ll ever
know.
Just a warning: now we get to the advice part of the speech. If I
can succeed in conveying only one piece of wisdom today, it is
this: Almost invariably, the students who get the most out of their
MIT education have come to know well at least one member of the
faculty. I urge you to make that one of your goals for your time at
MIT; perhaps you’ll make it a goal of your freshman year. Some of
you may find it surprising that this is a very easy assignment: you
will meet faculty who teach your classes, and I encourage you to
accept their invitation to talk with them in office hours; I also
hope each of you, along with about 85% of our undergraduates, will
participate in “UROP”, our Undergraduate Research Opportunities
Program, that offers the opportunity to engage in cutting-edge
research with faculty. You will discover countless other avenues,
inside and outside of classes, to meet with faculty.
Over the next four years, you and your classmates will also teach
one another. There is a good chance that you will never again live
and work in a community with as rich an array of different cultures
and backgrounds as MIT. You will share your MIT experience with
classmates who don’t look or talk or think like you, which will
prepare you well for the global collaborations inevitable in your
careers. What’s more, you don’t have to look very hard for new
intellectual adventures here. You can take a hands-on summer
internship in a foreign country through the program we call MISTI
(MIT International Science and Technology Initiative). You can hear
the Boston Symphony Orchestra or visit the Museum of Fine Arts,
with free tickets from our Office for the Arts. And you can travel,
or sample classes or activities you’ve never done before, during
the Independent Activities Period, or IAP, in January. Be as
determined in your curiosity as Leonardo da Vinci – and you will
use your time at MIT to its fullest potential.
You are starting your college careers at an uncertain, unsettling
time, for this country and for the world. But even so – especially
so – I believe you will find MIT an inspiring place to study, to
learn and to grow. MIT is a place of practical optimism and of
passionate engagement with the most important problems of the
world. It is a place that is not satisfied until it finds the
deepest answers.
So let me close with one last word of wisdom from da Vinci. As he
wrote, “I had long since observed that people of accomplishment
rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and
happened to things.” That is the story of MIT, and it is a formula
for inventing the future.
We are delighted that you have joined us here to help write the
next chapter in the history of human understanding. Now, go out and
happen to things!
