Engineering and the Mind's Eye

In this insightful and incisive essay, Eugene Ferguson demonstrates that good engineering is as much a matter of intuition and nonverbal thinking as of equations and computation. He argues that a system of engineering education that ignores nonverbal thinking will produce engineers who are dangerously ignorant of the many ways in which the real world differs from the mathematical models constructed in academic minds.A sophisticated, thoughtful, and provocative analysis of thenature of engineering.—Steven Lubar, Science—Eugene Ferguson is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Delaware.