What I Learned Today

I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.

Well, I’m not John Lienhard, but I’m delighted to make his acquaintance. I just discovered the excellent podcast, “Engines of Our Ingenuity”, which “tells the story of how our culture is formed by human creativity.” Each ~4-minute episode covers some interesting concept, device, invention, inventor, or tidbit of history that bears on our world today. The first one that came up when I subscribed was on The Calculus—and the delightfully accessible and meaningful way in which this subject was covered won me over immediately. Calculus, the mathematics of change, is described as “not any harder than algebra,” just having “quite a different look and feel.”

A beautiful moment in this episode is when Dr. Lienhard connects the concept of calculus to our own lives:

We all see our lives as fleeting moments and as the sum of fragments almost too small to notice.

and then proceeds to quote Joan Didion (Run, River):

“Was there ever in anyone’s life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?”

Indeed.

This show has been going on since 1988. What a wealth of archives to explore! I very much look forward to learning more from Dr. Lienhard about the basis of inventions, and I’m grateful that people out there take the time to create such impressive, useful, fascinating content!