Imagining through mathematics
Ruth Charney ’72, M.A. ’72
Professor and Chair, Department of MathematicsPh.D., Princeton University
Some people love math because it demystifies real phenomena and creates models one can use to explain the world, says Ruth Charney. “But personally,” she notes, “what I love about math is the aesthetic of it, the internal beauty of it, and the challenge of it. Math enables you to think about things you could never have imagined without it.”
Exposed to science by a dad who worked at the National Institutes of Health, Charney studied math at Brandeis, where she earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in four years. She then took a year off to explore modern dance before going on to pursue a doctorate. After teaching at Berkeley, Yale and Ohio State, she returned to Brandeis in 2003.
A specialist in geometric group theory — a field lying at the crossroads of algebra and topology — Charney recently served as vice president of the American Mathematic Society. On campus, she participates in Women in Science, a community of graduate students, postdocs and professors dedicated to making science what she calls “a welcoming place for women.”
The million-dollar professor
Irving Epstein
Henry F. Fischbach Professor of ChemistryPh.D., Harvard University
When Irv Epstein was named a prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, he used the $1 million award to solve a different kind of chemistry problem.
“The thing I noticed in teaching science courses is that you’re looking out at essentially a sea of white faces,” Epstein says. So he created the Science Posse program, using the model developed by the successful Posse Foundation. Started by Deborah Bial ’87, the Posse program identifies talented high school students from diverse backgrounds who demonstrate an aptitude for academics and strong leadership qualities and provides them with full scholarships, admitting them in groups of peers who can provide each other with support.
Epstein thinks his posse won’t just change the makeup of his chemistry classes, but will also lead to advances in scientific research. “If everyone has the same set of life experiences, when they look at the Petri dish, they’re more likely to see things in the same way,” he says. “For breakthroughs to occur, someone has to look at that Petri dish a little differently.”
Computers and evolution
Jordan Pollack
Professor of Computer Science and of the Volen Center for Complex SystemsPh.D., University of Illinois
Computer science was in its infancy when Jordan Pollack entered college in 1974, so he taught himself programming while puzzling over whether machines could ever become smart or whether they had the potential only to follow orders. After working at IBM, he returned to academe to explore this nagging question as a PhD candidate.
Since 1994, he has meshed research and teaching at Brandeis with heavy doses of entrepreneurship, churning out high-tech inventions while running the university’s Dynamical and Evolutionary Machine Organization (DEMO) lab.
Collaborating with undergrad and grad students, Pollack has advanced the state of knowledge in artificial intelligence, artificial life and related fields. His GOLEM project was the first to yield promising results in evolutionary robotics by manufacturing machines evolved in pure simulation. Recently, he launched an innovative children’s learning-games system called BEEweb. These results stem from Pollack’s audacious goal of using computer software and electronics to replicate open-ended evolution in nature.
“Most robotics research,” he once said, “is about adding brains to animatronic puppets, which is a lost cause. In nature, the body and brain co-evolve together, like the chicken and the egg.”