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L. Mahadevan is a professor of applied mathematics. But he's also a physicist. And an engineer. ''One doesn't have to look too hard around to find interesting questions, beautiful questions,'' he said.
Take one of his latest riddles: the physics of walking a slackline
L. Mahadevan smiled at the question, which was: "What, exactly, do
you do?" It is, on the surface, a simple question, but for Mahadevan
the answer could lead many places. Or, maybe, that's the answer, that
Mahadevan, a 43-year-old professor at Harvard, studies seemingly
simple, everyday questions - such as, how does fabric drape? paper
wrinkle? paint dry? -and hopes that they may lead to new places in
science.
"I'm a wanderer," Mahadevan said. "I tend to be maybe too curious about
too many things. And most of the time I fail in satisfying that
curiosity. But," he said, as he raised the eyebrows on his boyish face,
"one curiosity leads to another."
Harvard lists Mahadevan as a professor of applied mathematics. But he's
also a physicist. And an engineer. And he holds appointments in
Harvard's biology department. He is, he finally concludes, "just a
scientist," whose interest is a world where "everything is a puzzle of
why and how and what."
Take one of his latest riddles: the physics of walking a slackline.
Mahadevan happened to read an article about the sport - a slackline is
a cousin of the circus tightrope, but the line is flat and slack and
the tension on the line is provided by the weight of the walker - and
then watched a YouTube video and then. . . last week, the chalkboard in
his office was filled with equations.
"What is that you're responding to that allows you to keep your
balance? What are the parameters that control that stability?" he asked
as he rocked from side to side. "Where does it lead to? I don't know. I
just know that it's an interesting question. I don't think too much
about practical applications."
Joseph Keller - a professor of mathematics and engineering at Stanford
who was Mahadevan's adviser and role model, he says, in the attempt to
try and explain everything - remembers that Mahadevan spent so much
time jumping between interests that he had to force him to focus if he
was ever going to get his doctorate.
"In some sense, he's like many Renaissance scientists," Keller said.
"In those days, there wasn't the extreme specialization we have now.
They did whatever they had to do to understand the problems that
interested them. And that's what he's doing now. He's really a star in
a number of different areas."
Mahadevan finds a parallel between his wandering life and his roving
existence. He grew up all over the place in India, and since joining
academia he's bounced around the egghead capitals of the world, from
Stanford to MIT to Cambridge University in England to Harvard. This is
how he likes it, constantly moving, finding some small glimpse of
knowledge that is portable, that he can take with him to his next
riddle. "One could work on a problem for a long time, or one could
wander. I'm not an expert on anything," he said. This "diffused" label,
he thinks, is an advantage; it protects him from expectations.
Last
fall, Mahadevan received a bit of publicity when he concluded that a
flying carpet was theoretically possible. At least that's how the media
cast it; in reality, he explains as he picks up a piece of paper and
drops it so it glides across a desk, he was exploring the why and how
and what of that particular action. And he's turned his recent focus -
at least "focus" in the Mahadevian sense - to morphogenesis, the study
of how shapes arise, such as the shape of a leaf.
FACT SHEET
"I'm into plants right now because they've solved a lot of problems,"
he said. "They've learned a lot. They can adapt without being able to
move around. If I'm a problem solver, I want to figure out how other
organisms solve problems." He said his ideas come to him late at night
when it's quiet. Or lying in bed just before he goes to sleep. Or at
classical music concerts. Or. . . OK, it happens everywhere.
"One doesn't have to look too hard around to find interesting
questions, beautiful questions," he said as he glanced around his
office, his face carrying the certainty that he could find another
beautiful problem if he just looked. In some sense, Mahadevan admits
that his curiosity is a bit uncontrolled. His children, he said with a
big smile, think he's very, very weird. "Curiosity is a dirty word
sometimes," he said. "But when you stop being curious, you stop
learning."
Recently, he found a book in a secondhand bookstore called "The
Encyclopedia of Ignorance" and just had to buy it. "I was surprised to
see how thin it was! We know a lot less than we think we do. "
Billy Baker / The Boston Globe
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