Open course ware

GUEST SPEAKER: The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license. Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. To make a donation, or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. HERBERT GROSS: Hi. Our lecture today involves the backbone of Calculus, namely the concept of limit, and perhaps no place in the history of mathematics is there a more subtle topic than this particular one. I'm reminded of the anecdote of the professor who was staring quite intently, philosophically, in his home, and his wife asked, what are you contemplating, and he said, that it's amazing how electricity works. And the wife said, well what's so amazing about that? All you have to do is flick the switch. And this somehow or other is exactly the predicament that the limit concept falls into. From the point of view of computation, it seems that what comes nat...

GUEST SPEAKER 1: So hi, everyone. My name's Nicole. I'm here with Elaine. And both of us are part of the Society of Women Engineers. So we both just wanted to give you a little bit of background on ourselves, and then talk about some of the opportunities that SWE has. So I actually didn't know anything about SWE when I was in high school, either. I learned about it during my senior year. So SWE has multiple scholarships. We give away thousands and thousands of dollars to support girls who are excited about STEM and about engineering and getting involved in those fields. So when I [AUDIO OUT] had no idea what I wanted to do. I really liked doing the engineering side of things. So I'd worked in a lab for a couple summers at UCLA in a bioengineering lab. But I also really liked the business side. So I was part of a floral arrangement business, actually, that was run by my school. And so we did everything from marketing to sales to actually putting the flower ...

GUEST SPEAKER: And what we'll be doing is getting started with our panel discussion. We have structured this discussion to leave a lot of time for questions and answers and discussion from the floor. So this afternoon, we've heard about ways in which OpenCourseWare and similar resources are being transformational in how people get access to information and how they use it. Now I want to turn our attention more to the future and the changes we're likely to see in the years to come. My pleasure to introduce this panel-- the moderator for the panel is professor Hal Abelson. He's a class of 1922 professor of computer science and engineering in the MIT department of electrical engineering and computer science. He's joined in the panel by three distinguished individuals-- Dr. Charles Vest, who, of course, all of us here know extraordinarily well, is currently the president of the National Academy of Engineering and of course the president emeritus of MIT. Jo...