Finding Physics in Everyday Objects from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

I spent part of the summer of 1993 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, attending a month-long workshop for young scientists organized by the Santa Fe Institute, a research center for complexity science. Out of the dozens of interesting young scholars participating, the most memorable is certainly Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan who was a senior graduate student at the time and now works as a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University. Maha, as he instructed us to call him, also works in physics and mechanical engineering.

In the video above, you can listen to Maha linking patterning in nanotubes with the wrinkling of elephant trunks, sharing his deep intuition about the physical world in such a gentle way that even the non-mathematically inclined can appreciate the rich beauty and poetry of his approach to understanding natural phenomena. Listen also to his fascinating explanation of the difficulty of folding maps, a solution found in natural systems, and an approach devised by Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura for folding large solar panels in space travel.

In Sanskrit, the word maha means great, which seems an appropriate way to describe Prof. Mahadevan.