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Rather, she reflected on the importance of those institutions for allowing her to flourish. When Dresselhaus told this story, she didn’t emphasize her own impressive initiative. I took the exam, and I got into the school.”
Dresselhaus solid state physics how to#
But, New York has very good libraries.… I checked out books and got to work, and I figured out how to do all these problems.
I couldn’t even understand the language on these exams it was like another world. “I wrote away for information and got some old exams and looked at them,” Dresselhaus recalled. Her under-resourced grade school in the Bronx had little knowledge of how to funnel talented students into the city’s magnet schools for high-achieving students, but her older brother, who attended the Bronx High School of Science, made her aware of the opportunity for girls to apply to the Hunter College High School. New York’s public resources again served Dresselhaus well when it came time to select a high school. She also snuck past the ticket booth at the Hayden Planetarium repeatedly, committing its shows and collections to memory.
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She grew up in New York City, where the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and others allowed free admission, and the keen teenager could scurry among them on the subway for a nickel a ride, with the money she’d earned working in a zipper factory. She credited museums with turning her into a scientist. Veterans of Dresselhaus’ solid state theory course at MIT remember it as a model of clarity, and the scores of Ph.D.s and countless visiting students she supervised speak to the fruitfulness of her educational philosophy.ĭresselhaus became a remarkable teacher in part because she was a remarkable learner.
In the heyday of the shut-up-and-calculate attitude, Dresselhaus developed a way to teach physics that was supportive and inclusive while still being demanding and rigorous. Students would have to develop mathematical skills quickly, with little direct oversight, or risk washing out. They taught larger classes that drilled students in mathematical techniques, which could be taught through large lectures and assessed straightforwardly with written examinations. University teachers responded by retreating from one-on-one mentorship. The skyrocketing cachet of a physics degree packed physics classrooms with students during the Cold War. This practice, a legacy of over-subscribed Cold War–era courses, has little to recommend it in an era when physics programs struggle to keep up with larger enrollments in biology. Physics curricula often feature an intentionally brutal “weed-out” course, designed to deter students who lack mathematical preparation and cannot acquire it quickly enough. Here, I focus on a less noted (though no less noteworthy) aspect of her legacy: her influence as a teacher.
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She was the first woman to be named an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and she pioneered leadership roles for women in many of the professional societies and organizations to which she belonged. Her groundwork ensured that when Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolated and characterized graphene, they were a shoo-in for the 2010 Nobel Prize.ĭresselhaus also earned renown advocating for women in science. The “Queen of Carbon” pioneered the physical study of the sixth element well before the keen attention attracted by fullerenes and nanotubes. When these exotic carbon compounds arrived on the scene, she became a world-leading expert on them, coauthoring the standard textbook. When Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus passed away in February 2017, she left behind an indelible legacy.
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