Physics World reporter Jesse Wade spotlights “Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus,” a new book by Maia Weinstock, deputy editorial director at MIT News. “With Carbon Queen, Weinstock does more than tell the story of a brilliant scientist’s life,” writes Wade. “She transports you into a world of curiosity and wonder, driven by enthusiasm and persistence.”
Boston Globe correspondent Rose Pecci spotlights Joseph Applegate, a linguist who was the first appointed Black faculty member at MIT. Applegate “had a 60-year career in languages. By the end of his career, he knew 13 of them and was considered an expert on the Berber tongues of North Africa.”
The MIT Haystack Observatory honored the work of Herbert Weiss, a trailblazing engineer and former researcher at MIT Lincoln Lab who helped establish Haystack, which operates a radio telescope whose work “is the stuff of scientific legend,” writes Thomas Farragher for The Boston Globe. “This place wouldn’t exist if he had not had the leadership and the vision and the drive to make it happen,” says Colin J. Lonsdale, director of Haystack.
Oliver “Ollie” Smoot ’62 speaks with Rob Michaelson of NBC Boston about the origin and history of the Smoot, a unit of measurement created when Smoot and his friends used the length of his body to measure the bridge that brings Massachusetts Avenue from Cambridge to Boston.
A coalition of students, faculty and alumni have come together to raise the funds necessary to replace the radome that sits atop the Building 54, reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “Once the overhaul is complete, MIT’s radio buffs, astronomers, and satellite researchers will have a tool that will serve them for decades,” writes Bray. “And they’ll have also preserved one of the school’s most famous landmarks.”
In an article for The Wall Street Journal about a new book, “The Secret History of Home Economics,” Barbara Spindel spotlights alumna Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to attend MIT and the institute’s first female instructor. The book’s author, Danielle Dreilinger writes that Richards “believed fervently in the power of science to free women from ‘drudgery.’”
Writing for Cambridge Day, Marieke Van Damme, executive director of the Cambridge Historical Society, explores the life and work of alumna Lois Lilley Howe, a member of the Class of 1890. Howe was “a trailblazer, one of the first women to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s architectural program, the organizer of the only all-woman architectural firm in Boston in the early 20th century and the first woman elected as a fellow of the American Institute of Architects,” writes Van Damme.
Popular Mechanics reporter Mike Darling spotlights a math problem from an 1876 MIT entrance exam. The prompt read as follows: “A father said to his son, Two years ago I was three times as old as you; but in fourteen years I shall be only twice as old as you. What were the ages of each?’”
Prof. Emerita Judith Jarvis Thomson, known for her work creating “new fields of inquiry in philosophy through her writings on abortion and a moral thought experiment that she named the ‘Trolley Problem’,” has died at age 91, reports Alex Taub for The New York Times. Taub notes that Thomson “wrote some of the most influential papers in contemporary American philosophy” and “made her imagination her most powerful intellectual tool.”
Writing for Astronomy, Korey Haynes features Saydean Zeldin’s work at the MIT Instrumentation Lab designing software that allowed the Apollo astronauts to control the spacecraft engines. Haynes notes that Zeldin has had “a major hand in the way technology works today.”
Writing for Astronomy, Korey Haynes spotlights Elaine Denniston, who was hired as a keypuncher at the MIT Instrumentation Lab, but went above and beyond, reviewing the Apollo code for errors. Denniston, who went on to become a lawyer, says that she “didn’t realize then that what I did was anything special. I typed, I found errors, I nagged people.”
Code developed by Margaret Hamilton, who led the development of the onboard flight software for the Apollo missions at the MIT Instrumentation Lab, was “good — so good, in fact, that it very well might have saved the entire Apollo 11 mission,” writes Dylan Matthews for Vox.
Writing for The Boston Globe, Shirley Leung spotlights the thousands of women who helped make the Apollo 11 mission a success, including Margaret Hamilton and Saydean Zeldin of the MIT Instrumentation Lab. Zeldin, who worked on the program responsible for turning the command module’s engines on and off, recalls that she “had to formulate the equations that we were going to code.”
CBS News reporter Norah O’Donnell explores how Margaret Hamilton, who led the development of the onboard flight software for the Apollo missions, was “critical to the success of the Apollo 11 mission.” Hamilton explains that, “It was the first time man walked on the moon and the first time software ran on the moon.”
CBS News reporter William Harwood spotlights the Apollo 11 astronauts who made history by successfully completing the first landing on the moon, including Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, who “earned a Ph.D. in orbital mechanics from MIT and helped perfect the rendezvous techniques needed by Apollo crews.”