Kent State University will host a seminar by Harvard Chemistry Professor George M. Whitesides at the Kent Student Center, Kiva on Tuesday, October 9, 2012 at 3:30 p.m. The seminar, Simplicity as a Component of Invention is free and open to all faculty members, staff, students, and the public.
According to Whitesides, "Complexity" is relatively simple to think about (at least for academics); "simplicity" is more complex. This seminar will consider "simplicity" (together with an idea called "stackability") as a parameter in research, using two examples--one from ongoing large-scale technology, and one from work conducted by the Whitesides Research Group.
Whitesides is world-renowned for the amazing breadth of his scientific inquiry. With more than 1,000 scholarly scientific articles, he is one of the most cited scientists in the world for research in the areas of NMR spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecular self-assembly, soft lithography, microfabrication, microfluidics, and nanotechnology. He is currently the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard, one of only 21 University Professorships at the institution.