The Yale Science and Engineering Association (YSEA), an alumni organization founded in 1914 that connects alumni to students and strengthens scholarship and collaboration within the Yale science and engineering community, recently featured four alumni authors in its Fall into Books webinar series.
According to Elissa Levy ’09, the president of YSEA, the series emerged out of a virtual gathering last year when it was discovered that several alumni attendees had recently authored books for the public based on their research. The YSEA launched the series as a platform to help engage Yale alumni in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) across the generations.
“Our goal is to celebrate alumni who’ve written books in STEM,” Levy said. “Our writers gain an additional platform and publicity, and our attendees get direct access to learn from, and ask questions of, these incredible researchers.”
The first installment of the series kicked off with Danielle Spencer ’95, who discussed her book Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity and the phenomenon of “metagnosis,” a term she coined to describe the experience of learning about a longstanding condition that is undetected until adulthood – the person may not necessarily experience any illness or sickness from the condition.
According to Spencer, who is the academic director of Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine Program, metagnosis doesn’t garner much public attention but it is often a significant and bewildering revelation for the person experiencing it.
“It can be tremendously unsettling to just suddenly have that information,” she said. “There are things about you that you don’t know, and if you learn about them, how would that change things, or would it change things at all.”
Having experienced metagnosis personally when she learned of a vision-related condition later in life, Spencer expressed her hope that others who experience this phenomenon will feel empowered to author their own narratives relating to their bodies, as opposed to feeling defined, often negatively, by societal categories and ableism.
“I want us all to be more empowered to be able to figure out what kind of narratives, what kind of self-definitions, are best for us.”
The second installment of the series featured Roland Boucher ’55 MEng and his book Ancient Measurement: How Ancient Civilizations Created Precise and Reproducible Standards. A licensed professional engineer and former engineering program manager with the Hughes Aircraft Company (Space Division) in California, Boucher discussed the remarkably accurate standards of measurement in the ancient world and the incredible achievements of such numerate civilizations as the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Minoans.
As an illustrative example, he referenced two monuments from the Sumerians that demonstrate their system of measurement: The Great Pyramid at Giza, which was built to Sumerian standards with an error of only 185 parts per million, and The Parthenon, in Athens, built 2000 years later to the same standard.
According to Boucher, the significance of mathematics in the ancient world, and for the history of humanity, is evident from its development before written communications.
“Mathematics is probably 50,000 years old, a lot older than writing,” he said. “Mathematics was developed because it needed to be developed.”
He emphasized that the sophistication of ancient civilizations to make sense of the world, and our universe, through mathematics and systems of measurement disproves the notion that they were primitive societies, even by modern standards.
“They were as smart as we are,” Boucher said. “No question about it.”
In the third installment, Jon Lieff ’66 discussed his latest book The Secret Language of Cells: What Biological Conversations Tell Us About the Brain-Body Connection, the Future of Medicine, and Life Itself and the communication that exists among living cells in the human body.
A physician, neuropsychiatrist, and nationally recognized expert in geriatric psychiatry, including as a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, Lieff said he came to appreciate the importance of this topic through his research.
“The whole of medicine, the whole of biology, even life, is based not just on cells but cells talking to each other,” he said. “There’s so much communication, you cannot separate the brain and the body.”
Lieff added that further research and discoveries on this topic hold great promise of yielding significant advancements and breakthroughs in medicine.
“All the new treatments are based upon the natural conversations between T-cells and cancers, between viruses, microbes, and cancers and immune cells,” he said. “All of this is going on and medicine is involved in either manipulating it or amplifying it, or putting in new genes to move the virus and vary it using phages to do this and that.”
The series concluded in its fourth installment with Jim Stein ’62, a semi-retired professor who taught for 40 years at California State University in Long Beach, California. He discussed The Fate of Schrodinger's Cat: Using Math and Computers to Explore the Counterintuitive and the surprising results that can come from mathematics.
Having explored controversial questions relating to prediction, decision-making, and statistical analysis in his career, Stein indicated that while mathematics is a field that is worthy of study for its own sake, it offers numerous practical applications to improve our lives and better understand the universe in which we live.
“That’s the seductiveness of mathematics,” he said. “You can do something that’s totally useless and it turns out to be so basic, you’d never have believed it.”
He noted, for instance, that decades after the death, in 1947, of English mathematician G.H. Hardy, his work on number theory served as the basis for the RSA algorithm, which underlies the security of every computer password in the modern world.
Stein added that while most of the papers that mathematicians write are consigned to obscurity, their theories and ideas live on until they are rediscovered by future generations for the benefit of humanity. This, said Stein, is precisely why the continuing study of mathematics remains such an important endeavor of human development.
“What you’re doing is you’re contributing to this long structure which goes back to the Grecian era and will continue far into the future,” he said. “And you’ve been a part of building this edifice.”
With the success of the Fall into Books series, Levy said YSEA is already exploring its spring lineup and looks forward to spotlighting the work of other STEM alumni authors.
“We’d love to have more alumni authors reach out to us!”
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