What is now proved was once only imagined

Welcome to?The?Art?of?The?Impossible, a weekly newsletter where I unearth five pieces?of?content which I hope will both inspire?and?embolden you.

PODCAST

"The idea was basically that the next step in our evolution as human beings is that we're creating machines that will, just like?a car or motorcycle expands our capacity to move through the world, the, artificial intelligence machine will enable us?to think and to contemplate and to create vastly faster and wider and broader than what we can do without it."

New podcast out now with Tamiko Thiel - a mechanical engineer and artist who led the design of The Connection Machine - a $5 Million Supercomputer. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts from.

QUOTE

What is now proved was once only imagined.

William Blake

INTERVIEW

An interview from 2004 with Dr. John Nash who talks about the impact the Nobel Prize had on his life (many years of unemployment and financial insecurity prior), his talent for mathematics as a child, his work that led to the Prize, advice to young students, and his thoughts on the movie on his life, A Beautiful Mind.

BOOK

Pieces of the Action by Vannevar Bush

An inside account of one of the most innovative R&D ecosystems of the 20th century, from the man who was at the center of it all.

This book was recommended by friend of my podcast David Senra (host of Founders Podcast) whose interview you can listen to here. Over a 60-year career in public affairs, Vannevar Bush—engineer, inventor, educator, and public face of government-funded science—sought to eliminate roadblocks to innovation in science and technology. In Pieces of the Action, a collection of memoir-essays, he reflects on his role in shaping the policies and organizations that powered American research and development in the mid-20th century. As the architect and administrator of an R&D pipeline that efficiently coordinated the work of civilian scientists and the military during World War II, he was central to catalyzing the development of radar and the proximity fuze, the mass production of penicillin, and the initiation of the Manhattan Project.

Pieces of the Action offers his hard-won lessons on how to operate and manage effectively within complex organizations, build bridges between people and disciplines, and drive ambitious, unprecedented programs to fruition. With wry humor, Bush also shares personal observations and anecdotes—pelting cows with apples, poking fun at servicemen who tried to keep his own invention secret from him—that offer a glimpse of the personality behind the accolades.

Originally published in 1970, this updated edition from Stripe Press includes 15 archival images from Bush’s life and career and a foreword from entrepreneur and Idea Machines podcast host Ben Reinhardt that contextualizes the lessons Pieces of the Action can offer to contemporary readers: that change depends both on heroic individuals and effective organizations; that a leader’s job is one of coordination; and that the path from idea to innovation is a long and winding one, inextricably bound to those involved—those enduring figures who have a piece of the action.

Buy the book here.

FILM

Despite the inaccuracies often found in Hollywood films, A Beautiful Mind charts the life of award-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr, based on a book of the same name.

Nash won both the Nobel Prize and the Abel Prize. In 1994, he was one of three recipients of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, a price commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics. In 2015, Nash and Louis Nirenberg received the Abel Prize, a prestigious Norwegian prize modelled on the Nobel Prize, for outstanding achievements in mathematics. Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contributions to game theory, while the Abel Prize was bestowed upon him for his work on nonlinear partial differential equations.

The film focuses a lot on his work, as well as his issues with mental illness - something I believe afflicts many geniuses (read my thoughts here).

Thank you for reading?the?newsletter?and?for listening to?the?podcast, and?if you enjoy them, please do share with your network - my goal is to have these stories reach as many as possible so that others can be inspired too.

Danielle