Academics

Funny, but all these many pages into this account, this is almost the first time I’ve brought up the topic of the academic studies that motivated the whole enterprise. Partly, that’s because the classroom is ill-suited to interesting photography, and this is largely a photographic essay. This (1965) yearbook shot of Professor Karl Uno Ingard lecturing in the big hall known as 26-100 is about as good as it gets. Whee.

OK, let me tell you about Uno Ingard. Maybe by 1960 or 1961, these freshmen may have derived entertainment (as captioned above) from his sections on Newtonian mechanics. A couple of years earlier, when I endured Physics 8.01 in that same hall, however, the delight was pretty much muted. That year, you see, Uno Ingard and William Kraushaar of the Physics Department were teaching from their wonderful new text, entitled Interactions and Motion. Well, almost. The book wasn’t quite finished, and we would get a new installment of mimeographed draft pages from time to time, with all that implied for sloppiness, inaccuracy, and general frustration.

You’ll imagine my delight, then, when upon returning for my senior year in 1964, I found myself registered for yet another Ingard course: Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics. Wish I could reproduce the Swedish lilt with which the great man said at the first lecture, “I hate therrrmo! We’ll spend two weeks on therrrmo. I like Stat-Mech! You’re going to get my very own derivation of Stat-Mech; that means, of course, that you’ll have to come to lectures, because it isn’t in any book.” This drew boos and hisses, for MIT cherished one great, merciful, and traditional instructional policy: optional lectures. Nobody took attendance at lectures, which were nonethless generally well-attended.

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