my last blog

Albert Einstein and Thomas Alva Edison were, though equally praise worthy, two completely different individuals.
Einstein was what I would call a "thinker". He thought for a living and much of his thoughts were understood only long after he was gone. With computers, people took several years after his time to fully comprehend the full implications and the utter simplicity underlying several of his calculations and predictions. He was best in his element with a pen and a piece of paper.

Edison, on the other had was a "doer". He did. He had over 1000 patents, which I believe is a world record to this day (and by far at that). He always got his hands dirty. He believed in building things, not thinking about them. He was one of those people who had to see (and in most cases, make,) to believe. He was in his element when playing with something or building something that worked.

As a result, if you notice, much of the work Einstein did was in extremely complicated mathematics while much of the work Edison did involved the simplest concepts of electricity and magnetism. This is the fundamental difference and I would like to impress that both are equally important in its own right. We cannot live without thinkers and we DEFINITELY cannot live without the doers.

So the question is what do I aspire to be ? Having spent a (hopefully significant !!!) two and a half years in doctoral school, new students ask me this question. To them I say, in a very sagely manner, "It depends". In other words, I haven't the slightest idea. Einstein seems a lot more romantic but Edison seems a lot more useful to the world in general. Einstein seems a lot more unachievable, but Edison seems to involve a lot more actual hard work.

I still am wondering who I want to be. Maybe some day I will succeed in one or fail terribly in the other and I will decide on one. Till that date, maybe I can just wait for comments to this post.

Naveen