By Jeff Hicks
Salim Zymet, in his article “Lighter workload for North Campus students provides flexibility to explore, critically think about real-world issues” (Opinion, March 3), uses base attacks on science and engineering programs that only prove a growing misunderstanding between the school of liberal thought and South Campus.
I found that Zymet has completely missed the point of science, mathematics and engineering.
While he writes that “creativity versus predictability and rigidity” or “critical thinking” versus “memorization” are the qualities that distinguish North and South Campus, his argument only points to his poor formulation of what math and science actually entail.
Science is the method of creating new understanding through minimal assumption; by exploring new innovative hypotheses, researchers have the most novel and breakthrough ideas that humanity has ever conjured.
When I think of the most influential and creative minds of the 20th century, my list includes Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Fritz Haber, Henry Ford and John Forbes Nash Jr. These five minds have influenced humankind in substantial ways. Without them, we would not have cell phones, computers, cars, food to eat or modern economics.
Students in South Campus, who follow the footsteps of these great minds, strive not to memorize, but to create new knowledge.
Zymet claims that mathematics is a subject devoid of critical thinking and imagination, when it is, by definition, the very study of abstraction. My idea of what mathematics requires in creativity can be summed up in a single quote from a mathematician who heard that his student had dropped out to become a poet: “Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician.”
And engineering, that dull subject that only entails “old-fashioned, memorization-based” learning is a study of innovation. I don’t know how one can logically label engineering as a field having “no connection to the real world.” Engineers have designed every product ever used, down to the brick and mortar that this campus is built with.
South Campus is not a place of rigidity, but a place where the sole goal of study is to produce paradigm-changing discoveries. I hope that North Campus students realize that the workload that we South Campus students take on is not forced. It is the product of our desire to understand the current model of the universe so that we may, through our own human ingenuity, contribute new knowledge to the general body of understanding.
Jeff Hicks, second-year mathematics and materials engineering student