• Question: Who is your hero in engineering?

    Asked by Elan to Shruti, Mark, Faranak, Douglas, Charlene, Alistair on 4 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Mark Bentley

      Mark Bentley answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      No real “famous” people to be honest.

      My heroes have been key people in my career, people who thought me and made me the engineer I am today.

      The skills they passed on to me I am now passing on to my own apprentice.

    • Photo: Shruti Turner

      Shruti Turner answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      I don’t think I have a hero in engineering, but there are lots of scientists and engineers that I admire and like to try and draw on the skills and attitudes they had to help me be successful. Whilst they’re not “engineers” by profession, I believe that they are engineers because of how they solved problems and created solutions.
      Alan Turing is one: he was the mathematician that created the computer that allowed the UK to crack Nazi codes in World War 2. His persistence, despite massive opposition and difficulties have shaped the world today. Without him, would we have the computers that we do?
      Another is Marie Curie, the physicist/chemist who discovered radiation and used her discovery to help improve medical practice on the front line in World War 1. Again, she had a lot of opposition as a female scientist at the time, but she kept going and her creation of the first x-ray machines saved many 100s of 1000s of lives over the years.

    • Photo: Faranak Bahrami

      Faranak Bahrami answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      There are and have been many great engineers/scientists/mathematicians/physicists that have contributed a lot to the world. I always admire those people for everything that they have done. there are many great minds around us in our everyday lives as well, and we should look up to them too. however, if I have to choose someone I would say Elon Musk, he has a great engineering and business mind, which I like a lot.

    • Photo: Charlene Chung

      Charlene Chung answered on 11 Mar 2019:

      Katherine Johnson. She’s a famous mathematician who worked for NASA and conducted really complicated calculations, which helped manning spaceflights.

    • Photo: Douglas Wragg

      Douglas Wragg answered on 12 Mar 2019:

      Thomas Edison – the man who never gave up and never admitted defeat!!!!
      When he was trying to find the right material for the element in a light bulb, he had tried over 1000 types of materials, and all of them had failed (he had not yet worked out that he had to create a vacuum!)
      One of his colleagues said to him “Tom, why don’t you just forget it – you have tried over 1000 materials, and none of them work.”
      Edison replied, and this is the truly inspirational bit, “Yes, but I am 1000 materials closer to finding the answer.”
      The rest, as they say, is history!!!!!

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