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Professor Patrick Henry Winston ’65, SM ’67, PhD ’70

It is not just MIT's 150th anniversary, it's my 50th.

Back in 1961, in the winter of my senior year in high school, my father said, “Well, you better go see what the place is like. Change trains in Chicago and get off at the last stop.”

This was long before parents routinely showed up on campus with embarrassed offspring in tow. My father simply put me on a train at Peoria, instructing me to visit MIT. I arrived at South Station early the next day, never having gone anywhere by myself before. I was tired after my first MIT-related all nighter, this one sitting up all night on the train.

After I arrived in Kendall Square, I started wandering around the edge of the campus, scared stiff, fearful that I would end up in some forbidden laboratory where I would be yelled at or even arrested. I made my way to the river, which was frozen and cold. I walked by the Great Dome, which I remember as big. And, of course, there were all those imposing names up on the buildings—Copernicus, Darwin, Newton, and lots more.

Then, I walked up Massachusetts Avenue, and there it was: the main entrance, distinguished by a door that opened when you passed by an electric eye, a novelty in those days.

When I saw it, I knew I had found Paradise. “Ok, this is the place,” I said to myself, screwed up my courage, found B. Alden Thresher's office, got interviewed, and showed up the next fall, never to leave.

The electric eye is still there. Sadly, it doesn't work. It's function is now handled by a mat you step on. But, in a place where progress is permanent, it is nice that a few anchor points are still around, and who knows, maybe some enterprising undergraduate will update it someday with a laser in its guts.

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Comments

Bill Flarsheim

Fri, 01/28/2011 10:27pm

Unlike Professor Winston, or most students today, I never visited MIT. I arrived the day before the Freshman Picnic, having never been within 200 miles of MIT before that. Later that first night, walking from Baker House back to my rush week room at Senior House, I looked up at the Great Dome and all of the famous names carved in the stone. It was hard to believe I was really there. A very heady experience for a 17 year old kid from Kentucky.

Paul Greenlee

Mon, 01/24/2011 6:41pm

For me, Calculus and Physics transformed my life. After 18.01 & 8.01 the world was different. For example, after understanding velocity, acceleration, energy and momentum, driving or even water-skiing was completely different experience.

My relationship with Professor Winston was also transformative.

I first met him (he a senior, I a freshman) in our fraternity, where he was our house tutor. His lecture on "Quizzmanship" spun my head around. Like many incoming student, I had been able to succeed in high school by brute force, by doing ALL the work. During that teaching moment, I got that working harder would not work; working smarter was the key, and that he had some brilliantly thought out techniques for thinking about how to be smarter about working smarter. I was thunderstruck by the idea that one could develop what we might now call meta-or super- heuristics about being smarter.

Some years later, (I was in and out of MIT several times.) I took his course on Artificial Intelligence. In particular I remember a class where he described some important results. "Intelligence is ephemeral" -- once you understand how to do "it," "it" no longer seems intelligent." And, in Artificial Intelligence, difficulty is inverse to perceived intelligence -- we rather easily developed machines to play championship chess, or to do symbolic math at a Master's level, but we are nowhere close to having a machine that can walk around a room as well as a cat. Those and other revelations still echo today.

And thirdly, I asked him for a recommendation for an elective. Without a pause he said "Professor Fredkin's, Problem Solving." In it's own way, that course also transformed my life.

Thank you Professor Winston.

Jon Tepper

Tue, 01/18/2011 12:24am

I Took Prof. Winston's Intro. to AI class in 1973, doing lots of weird stuff in tiny snippets of LISP, as I recall. The most unusual part was taking 12-hour quizzes and being allowed to work on them in small groups! There was a real party atmosphere as students gathered towards the deadline to turn in their work at the old Bush Room just off the Bldg. 10 lobby. Prof. Winston even provided munchies, which we very much appreciated!

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