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March-April 2008
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 The goal of Mahadevan’s science is to get at the essence of complex phenomena in the everyday world with explanations that anyone can understand, but that can also be described with full-blown mathematics. “Maha is not only a tremendous applied mathematician, he truly is a kind of Renaissance thinker,” says the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Venkatesh Narayanamurti. “Is he an applied mathematician? Is he an engineer? Is he a computational biologist? Or is he an applied physicist? He is all of the above,” Narayanamurti adds. “I hadn’t realized how much that was so until I got to know him after he joined the faculty. We are very fortunate in the last seven or eight years to have been able to recruit people like him: top-flight theoreticians who are solving important intellectual problems and doing all kinds of applied work as well.” As it happens, Mahadevan’s students and postdoctoral fellows, past and present, work in a variety of departments and disciplines, including biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and physics; at Harvard, his former postdoc Jacques Dumais is an assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology (OEB), and former student Adam Cohen is an assistant professor of chemistry.
Trained initially as an engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology-Chennai, Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan (la-shmin-ah-RYE-ah-non ma-ha-DAY-vun) turned to applied mathematics and mechanics under the tutelage of mathematician Joseph Keller (now professor emeritus) at Stanford, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1995; he was then briefly a postdoctoral fellow in physics and math at the University of Chicago. He held professorships in mechanical engineering at MIT, and in applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University (where he was the first ever Indian Professor on the Faculty of Mathematics) and a Fellow of Trinity College, before arriving in 2003 at Harvard, where he also has appointments in OEB within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and in systems biology at the Medical School (HMS). In addition, he is a visiting professor of mathematics at Oxford University, and of biology at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore. 
Photograph by Jim Harrison One of the “toys” in Mahadevan’s office forms a toroidal bubble—a doughnut—as interlocked metal rings spin down around a central tube. He hopes to learn what limits the speed of its descent. Although the problems he tackles vary in complexity, none is trivial in Mahadevan’s eyes. He does not believe in a hierarchy of problems, or even that their solutions belong to particular disciplines. “A problem is just that: a problem,” he says. “Nature does not tell us what kind of a problem it is—a physics problem, a biology problem, an engineering problem, an important problem, an unimportant problem…Nature couldn’t care less.” For example, he recently helped explain a problem puzzling the laboratory of a colleague, Mallinckrodt professor of physics and of applied physics David A. Weitz: why, in one experiment, a thin film of mud between two solid surfaces was cracking sporadically as it dried. The crack would remain still for a while, Mahadevan says, then “zip through suddenly and stop, pause for a while, then zip through and stop again.” Mahadevan helped explain what was going on as the mud dried, using very simple ideas about the way water moves through soft materials. Then, aware of the deep mathematical analogy between the rate at which materials dry and the rate at which they cool, he realized that his work on mud could be transposed to another experiment being done by two Canadian researchers, Lucas Goehring and Stephen W. Morris, who were seeking to explain the formation of giant, jointed basalt columns found in such places as the Devil’s Postpile National Monument in east central California. Often perfectly six- or eight-sided, the columns present in profile the appearance of enormous hitching posts; they were formed when volcanic rock cracked as it slowly cooled. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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