“Teaching with Toys” will be the topic of a seminar by Hassan Aref, the Reynolds Metals Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Virginia Tech, who also holds a Niels Bohr Visiting Professorship at the Technical University of Denmark.
The College of Engineering is sponsoring Aref’s talk, scheduled for May 1 at 3:30 p.m. on the Virginia Tech campus in Torgersen 2150. A reception prior to the seminar will be held on the second floor hallway outside the auditorium starting at 2:45 p.m.
Aref is lead author of an article “Toying with physics” that appeared in Europhyics News, a magazine of the European physics community.
As an example of an engineer’s view on “maddening mechanics,” Aref, the former dean of Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering, writes about the spinning top “that will rise to the vertical sleeping position,” “stone instruments made by primitive men…(that) display curious personalities,” and “eggs…(that are) baffling to classes with their different properties,” yet have identical shapes.
His examples are based on the work of other notable figures such as Lord Kelvin, Sir Hermann Bondi, emeritus professor Keith Moffatt of Cambridge University, and John Perry (1890) who wrote a book entitled “Spinning Tops.”
Beyond “maddening mechanics,” Aref also takes a look at “funny fluids” or, more conventionally, fluid mechanics that also “has its share of toys, including the “Ooze Tube,” “Brazil nut effect,” “Sand wand,” and the “Cartesian diver, sometimes known as the Cartesian Devil.”
To learn more about “Teaching with Toys,” attend the seminar, free and open to the general public.