Experimental Study Group

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The Experimental Study Group (ESG) describes itself as a freshman learning community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was created in 1969 by Professor George Valley to explore alternative teaching and learning methods in a small group setting at MIT. Students in ESG take their courses through a combination of small interactive classes, problem-solving sessions (often run by upperclass TAs),and discussion-oriented seminars.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology University in Massachusetts

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Institute is a land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant university, with an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The Institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Bates Center, and the Haystack Observatory, as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad and Whitehead Institutes. Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, MIT adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength, making it one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world.

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The program consists of 50 first-year students, 30 upperclass teaching assistants and associate advisors, 10 staff and faculty members, as well as ESG alumni and friends of the community. Most ESG students are first-year students interested in a more pro-active approach to their education, who concentrate on core MIT subjects in biology, chemistry, humanities, mathematics, and physics as an alternative to the large lecture classes taken by other classmates.

Current educational experimentation at ESG includes training students to teach, having freshman develop context-related problem sets, and creating videotapes of ESG students teaching core math and science concepts (ESGx). Each spring, ESG offers a series of half-credit, pass-fail seminars (funded by ESG alumni) on a variety of unique subjects, some of which are developed and taught by MIT upperclassmen. In the spring of 2012, seminars were run on: The Art and Science of Happiness, Polymath: The World in 10 Curves, Beyond a Website, The Chemistry of Sports, Fiber Seminar, and Introduction to Trading.

A problem set is a teaching tool used by many universities. Most courses in physics, math, engineering, chemistry, and computer science will give problem sets on a regular basis. They can also appear in other subjects, such as economics.

ESG was awarded the Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education in 1985. Staff members have also won the Sizer award, including Dr. Lee Perlman and Dr. Holly Sweet in 1997 for their work in developing the Sex Roles and Relationships seminar and associated MIT peer training program (GenderWorks) in gender relations, and Dr. Perlman again in 2015 for his teaching.

Past ESG directors include Professor George Valley (1969-1975), Professor Robert Halfman (1975-1985), Professor Kim Vandiver (1985-1989), Professor Vernon Ingram (1989-1999), Professor Emeritus Travis Merritt (1999-2002), and Professor Alexander Slocum, who is also an alumnus of ESG class of 1982 (2002-2013). Professor Leigh Royden has been ESG’s director since 2013.

Vernon Martin Ingram, PhD, FRS born Werner Adolf Martin Immerwahr, was a German American professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Leigh "Wiki" H. Royden is an American geologist.


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Noted alumni

Many ESG students have gone on to become celebrated alumni, including: three Rhodes scholars (Toby Ayer ’96, Christopher Douglas ’99, and Susanna Mierau ’00); two Fulbright scholars (Anna Waldman-Brown ’11 and Alicia Goodwin-Singham ’14); one MacArthur fellow (Marin Soljacic ’96); and a Nobel Prize winner for physics (Carl Wieman ’73) and "Danny" Hillis, designer of the Connection Machine, a parallel supercomputer, and co-founder of Thinking Machines Corporation, the company that produced the machine.

Carl Wieman Nobel prize winning US physicist

Carl Edwin Wieman is an American physicist and educationist at Stanford University. In 1995, while at the University of Colorado Boulder, he and Eric Allin Cornell produced the first true Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) and, in 2001, they and Wolfgang Ketterle were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Wieman currently holds a joint appointment as Professor of Physics and Professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, as well as the DRC Professor in the Stanford University School of Engineering.

Connection Machine

A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the early 1980s. Starting with CM-1, the machines were intended originally for applications in artificial intelligence (AI) and symbolic processing, but later versions found greater success in the field of computational science.

Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product named the Connection Machine. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to the MIT AI Lab. Thinking Machines made some of the most powerful supercomputers of the time, and by 1993 the four fastest computers in the world were Connection Machines. The firm filed for bankruptcy in 1994; its hardware and parallel computing software divisions were acquired in time by Sun Microsystems.

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References

  1. Solomon, Deborah (1985-05-10). "MIT honors 58 at ceremony". The Tech . Retrieved 2008-07-25.