opinion

In response to a NSF call for proposal on Cyberinfrastructure Training, Education, Advancement, and Mentoring for Our 21st Century Workforce (CI-TEAM), in June 2006, several of us submitted a proposal entitled "iMechanica:  Leveraging Cyberinfrastructure to Evolve All Knowledge of Applied Mechanics"

This has reference to (only) the *last paragraph* in Prof. Harry Lewis' recent post, found at: node/1423#comment-2880.

The reason I write the present post is because I always seem to have had a view of inventing, learning, or teaching mathematics that is remarkably at odds with what Prof. Lewis' last paragraph *seems* to imply.

I wish that this thought had come to me earlier, so that I could have posted it on April First.  No, I'm unaware of such a program.  Instead, Harvard faculty have just emerged from a multi-year review of curriculum, and reaffirmed the commitment to liberal education, after voting out a president not too long ago.

Reading the article, future role of iMechanica (node/908) posted by Teng (user/10), I am thinking that iMechanica may replace mechanical seminars, lectures conducted by invited mechanicians, in the future.

Academic seminars have several functions: first, to exchange information; second, to build up connections.

Update: An Open Source Review page has been created. Please feel free to leave links, codes and comments on the page. 

Dear Mechanicians,

I have seen that there is lot of code sharing among the mechanicians at iMechanica; a search for the word "code" for example produces nearly fifty entries, of which, I believe, at least half of the posts are pointers to codes and their sharing.

Each one of us developed his own knowledge structure. After graduation we followed different research interests, took different projects, and adopted different approaches, analytical, numerical, or experimental. Therefore the knowledge structure is unique for every person, coming from his/her education background and scientific experiences.

There are several levels for the overlapping in our knowledge structure.

As a moderator here on iMechanica, I have deleted a few posts recently that were clearly spam. As iMechanica grows and becomes more visible within the mechanics community and the broader internet community, we can expect the frequency of these kinds of posts to increase.

Recently, the Royal Society Science book prize shortlist was announced; though the shortlisted books cover psychology, evolution, biodiversity, medicine and neurobiology, none in the area of materials or mechanics made it to the list. Or, pick any Best American Science writing volume--there are hardly any articles about materials or mechanics that make it to these anthologies.