43rd Annual Michelson Memorial Lecture
"Lessons in Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership through the Nexus of Science, Math, Technology, and Art"
Julio M. Ottino
Mahan Hall
1900 Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Click here for the video.
Creativity is essential in Art, Math, Science, and Technology. Technology is about invention, making and building; Science is about unveiling, revealing what may already be there. It can be argued that Math is about invention and creation as well as discovery. Philosophers, placing the emphasis on uniqueness, placed artistic creation on the highest plane. Is this, however, true? Or more pragmatically, are there creative processes and lessons that can be transferred across domains? In what ways do the domains intersect and enrich each other? I will argue that artistic creativity reveals processes that hold lessons for scientific and technological creativity and innovation; and that a comparison across all domains contains a few lessons for leadership as well.
About Julio M. Ottino
Julio Mario Ottino is a researcher, engineering scientist, artist, author, and educator. He is a professor, and former dean, in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science as well as a professor in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
He previously held positions at UMass Amherst as well as chaired and senior appointments at Caltech, Stanford, and Minnesota. He is the founder and co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) and numerous university-wide initiatives, programs, and centers in the areas of design, energy and sustainability, human-computer interaction, and entrepreneurship, with the Kellogg School of Management, Pritzker School of Law, Feinberg School of Medicine, Medill School of Journalism, and the School of Education and Social Policy within Northwestern, as well as with external partners ranging from the Argonne National Lab to the Art Institute of Chicago.
His work on chaos, complexity, and granular dynamics has impacted a wide range of fields in physical and geophysical sciences, engineering, and nonlinear dynamics and has been featured on the covers of Nature, Science, Scientific American, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, and other publications. He has supervised more than 65 PhD theses and written over 260 papers.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the recipient of multiple awards from APS and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). In 2008 he was awarded the Fluid Dynamics Prize from APS and selected by AIChE as one of the “One Hundred Engineers of the Modern Era”. In 2017, he was awarded the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education from the National Academy of Engineering for the concept of whole-brain engineering. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His 2022 MIT press book, The Nexus, dealing with creativity and innovation at the intersection of art, technology, and science, in collaboration with noted designer Bruce Mau, was selected as category winner in the 2023 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers.
The Michelson Memorial Lecture Series is generously sponsored by the USNA Class of 1969.
