The Associated Press reports that Professor Marin Soljacic was one of three Massachusetts scientists to receive the prestigious Blavatnik National Award. Soljacic was recognized for his “discoveries of novel phenomena related to the interaction of light and matter, and his work on wireless power transfer technology.”
In a piece for The Guardian, Charles Darwent looks back at the life and work of Professor Emeritus Otto Peine, the former director of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Peine, who died last week in Berlin at the age of 86, was one of the pioneers of the ‘Zero’ art movement in postwar Germany.
Stephen Dowling writes for the BBC News about the legacy of former MIT professor of electrical engineering, Harold Edgerton. Edgerton’s pioneering photography work captured detailed images of moments occurring at speeds too high for the human eye to detect.
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is presenting Professor Emeritus Otto Piene’s large-scale slide installation The Proliferation of the Sun through Aug. 31, reports The Huffington Post. Piene, the former director of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, died shortly after the exhibit opened.
Bruce Weber of The New York Times reports on the legacy of Professor Emeritus Otto Piene, who died on July 17. “So many of his ideas are relevant today, from project-oriented work, to discussion-led thinking, to the ephemeral; all of that is now commonplace,” says Joachim Jäger, head of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
Boston Globe reporter Bryan Marquard memorializes the life and work of MIT Professor John G. King. “John G. King wanted students, and essentially everyone else, to watch science unfold before their eyes. It was, he believed, the only way to truly learn a subject,” Marquard writes.
In a piece for The Washington Post, Gregory Rodriguez highlights new MIT research on diversity. “The authors concluded that homogenous groups ‘were actually further than diverse groups from an objective index of accuracy,’” Rodriguez writes.
John McDermott of The Financial Times interviews Professor Junot Díaz about his childhood, his career as an author and teaching at MIT.
Institute Professor Noam Chomsky writes for The Huffington Post about how U.S. foreign policy is determined. Chomsky argues that U.S. policy urgently needs reexamination in order to address proximate and existential threats such as nuclear weapons and climate change.
Dan Vergano of National Geographic profiles Professor Alan Guth’s career in physics. "What always fascinated me about science was the desire to understand what underlies it all, and I think physics is basically the study of that," Guth explains.
Carolyn Johnson writes for The Boston Globe that Professor Robert Langer has been awarded the $500,000 Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology, which honors significant scientific, cultural, or spiritual leaders. Langer is best known for his pioneering contributions to the field of tissue engineering.
Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Douglas writes that Prof. Kristin Forbes, who was recently appointed to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, "highlighted a risk to economic recovery that is preoccupying central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic: Investors appear too sanguine about risk."
Live Science reporter Tanya Lewis highlights Shigeru Miyagawa’s work exploring the origins of human language. Miyagawa's hypothesis, “could explain how human language, which can theoretically produce infinite meanings, developed from the limited forms of communication seen in the rest of the animal world,” Lewis reports.
Douglas Martin writes for The New York Times about the late Professor Morris Adelman who died at his home in Newton on May 8. Adelman spent six decades as a faculty member in the MIT economics department.
Dan Adams covers the 2014 MIT commencement for The Boston Globe. “I want you to hack the world, until you make the world a little more like MIT,” said President L. Rafael Reif.