This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

New MacArthur Fellows announced today commonly called The Genius Grants.

Seven of the 21 fellows are mathematicians or scientists, and another is a science historian.

My name is Pamela Long, and I'm a historian of 15th and 16th century Europe of the history of science and

technology and cultural history. So I'm interested in the processes that occur

when infrastructure projects are undertaken.

What I'm very interested in is the relationship between practitioners who understand engineering and have trained on site to say repair bridges or

repair aqueducts and learned people, people with university training.

So you have this communication between practitioners and learned people.

And I argue that that's important for the development of the new sciences.

People call it the scientific revolution.

Well, it was a time when investigating the natural world,

the methods shifted to empirical methods to measurement and mathematical analysis.

So engineering became part of learned culture in a sense and that that broad context is

important for the development of new methodologies.

For the complete rundown on the new MacArthur fellows both in and outside the sciences go to

www Mac Found.org. Thanks for the minute for Scientific American 60

Second Science I'm Steve Mursky.