Mentors

We all have mentors in life, whether we realize it or not. Sometimes it is a coach or a school teacher; sometimes it is a parent or spouse or co-worker. One position that is typically associated with this role is a thesis adviser. When I was in university I would have benefited from a mentor but I did not find one there. Many individuals have supplied small components of what I needed, but no one person acted in that role for me. In reflecting on my intellectual development I have often wondered who would have made a good mentor for me.

There are certainly people in history who I admire greatly, both in their personality and accomplishments, and there would certainly be quite a list of them but I don't think there would have been that resonance between them and me that would be required from a well matched mentor and mentee. Yet when I reflect upon it, there are a couple of people who have indirectly motivated me and stimulated my intellectual development in a way that would be similar to mentor. I can't say that they are role models because it is not their life or personality that really influenced me, but rather their passion for Science.

The three that I would choose would be: Carl Sagan, Douglas Hofstatder and Richard Feynman. I was in university in the late 1970s and early 1980s and one of the most intellectually exciting events during that time was the release of Sagan's tv series Cosmos. That program was a mind expanding revelation to me. It wasn't so much the topic, although Cosmology is certainly one of my interests, but Sagan's manner of delivery that made this show so inspiring to me. Sagan also managed to weave together elements of the History of Science, Philosophy and more technical aspects such as Astronomy and Mathematics in a refreshing way that utilized the medium of television to its best advantage. What particular inspired me was Sagan's passion for his subject and how he could link it to other forms of human creativity such as art and music. There are certainly elements of his style that I found irritating, for example his much lampooned speaking style. Sometimes he seemed to be overly effusive on topics that he was passionate about. I did not always agree with his perspective or theories. However, this program and subsequent writings of his that I read, were a great influence on me. All education should be produced in the same was Cosmos was.

In the early 1980s a book entitled Godel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid (often referred to as simply GEB) won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and brought the ideas of its author, Douglas Hofstadter, to the mainstream. Technically this book stemmed out his Computer Science research on Artificial Intelligence but the breadth of the work was so much greater, one again linking Art and Music with Mathematics and Psychology. I would say that at the time the book was written it would have been said to have referred to Artificial Intelligence research but multi-disciplinary nature of his study would more likely be classified as Cognitive Science these days. Once again I did not always like the writing style utilized in GEB. I sometimes found it a little over the top, perhaps baroque would be a good way to describe it. The ideas, however, came through loud and clear and there is no question that this book set the direction for most of my intellectual pursuits since the time I read it. In addition to GEB Hofstadter also wrote an influential column for Scientific American called Metamagical Themas, which continued to stimulate and challenge for several years.

The last person who I would single out as a significant influence would be Richard Feynman. I read about him mostly through some popular books that he authored or co-authored such as "Surely You're Joking My. Feynman" and also from the Feynman Lectures on Physics. It was remarkable that a person who had garnered as many accolades as Feynman spent so much of his time trying to teach physics and pass on his passion for science. Unlike many people who are considered to be geniuses, he seems to have spent a lot of time engaging in meta-cognitive reflection and was able to articulate his thinking processes fairly clearly. His books and his biographical writing indicates that he often clowned around and seemed to not want to take his ability and the whole scientific establishment too seriously. One thing that I did notice about his ability, especially for calculation, is that he would not give up and would work feverishly all night to solve problems.

Anyway, those are my big three. There are many people who I have also studied and admired, but there is no doubt that this group stands out in terms of their overall influence, possibly due to the fact that our lifetimes overlapped. Since I am not a Cosmologist or a Physicist or a Computer Scientist, it is not the topics that they taught that influenced me the most. It was their passion and creativity.