Getting to meet some academic hero's!

It the past few months I've been very lucky/fortunate to get to meet/ask questions/listen to talks by some of my all time academic hero's. I thought I would share a few of those encounters/people here and include a chance for people to find out more about them:

Raman Sundrum
In September I got to attend a Fermilab Colloquium given by Raman Sundrum entitled "Warped Dimensions".

This was a really great talk about the possibility of general relativistic "warping" of higher dimensional space-time (don't worry if those words didn't mean much...they don't to most...but his talk would have you feeling like you maybe understood). The best part of his talk was how through simple illustration and explanation he gave access to the complicated and often misunderstood work of higher dimensional space-time and what this manifestation of this would be in accelerator based physics experiments.

I include and example image from his talk to show how a simple picture often is worth a thousand words.


Steven Levitt
The next academic hero of mine I got to meet and ask questions from was professor of economics at the University of Chicago, Steven Levitt. This was during a screening of the new movie Freakonomics that the U of C put on. Interestingly, they made this a "Pay-what-you-want" experiment as part of the screening process. Turns out that people paid basically what you would for a movie ticket (around 7 bucks if my memory serves) with some people paying as much as $100 dollars.
Not only am I a huge fan of Freakonomics books, and follow the blog (found here) and the new'ish podcast (found here) and have had the good fortune to see many lectures given by Prof Levitt, but I am also a fan of the method.

The extreme curiosity that Prof Levitt exudes through his work and when meeting him in person is something I myself strive for in life. To me his ideas of pursuing what is from data and example instead of the way we would like to think it is, is a wonderful approach for all scientists and curious minded people.

Also see the movie, even if you've read the book the visualization of the ideas and filmwork done is really good. An interesting side note: Prof Levitt during his Q&A at the screening revealed that very little of his own work went into the movie and in fact great portions where it seems that he is narrating was actually cobbled together from old lectures and he never actually gave his voice to that portion of the film

Peter McIntyre

Now this academic hero is kind of a cheat on my part because this is one person that not only have I got to meet and see lectures from, but I've also had the good fortune to work for and take courses from. Prof McIntyre is a professor at Texas A&M (my current school) and is by far and away one of the most brilliant people I've ever met.

One colloquium that I attended of his while at Fermilab was about a 100 TeV Proton/Anti-Proton Collider that he wants to see built in Texas. (Just for scale the best the LHC is going to do is 14 TeV....that is like saying if the tallest building in the world in 140 stories that the next building should be 1000 stories tall)

This is a man of great physics vision. He was one of the first people to imagine building a circular collider and to use Anti-matter for its collisions. From his mind (and that of many others) was the birth of Fermilab.

But his amazing-ness doesn't stop there. He works on 16 Tesla superconducting magnets, puts together plans for Thorium driven nuclear power, designs wave breaks to protect the Texas coast from hurricane driven waves, and manages to teach and inspire new generations of physicists.

He was a leader in proposing the now failed SSC tunnel at Texas...which would have pushed the US to the front of the world of particle physics for many years...instead of battling the LHC for years.

I took a introductory Quantum Mechanics course from him my first year in grad school and it was the hardest thing I've ever done...and the most rewarding course in terms of what I learned.

My hope is to be as well rounded, brilliant, and influential in my career as he has been in his.