Ingenious: Richard K. Miller - Issue 40: Learning
▻http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/ingenious-richard-k-miller
Richard K. Miller has been on a long intellectual journey. His ambitions started out modest enough: Growing up in the small farming community of Tranquillity, California, he thought that bridges were the pinnacle of engineering and that the people who designed them must be brilliant beyond imagining. As an engineering college student, he landed a summer internship for the Fresno County public works department, where someone explained to him that bridges were usually designed, not from scratch, but by choosing parts out of a catalog. The real action, it seemed, was in writing the catalog. To do that, he was told you need a master’s degree, and so he set his eyes on graduate school. But it would turn out that the catalog engineer was solving the same problem over and over. Miller wanted (...)