Adrian Bejan | Diversity Through Freedom & School of Thought
In this video, Adrian Bejan discusses a celebration at Duke and uses 7 slides to give a brief overview of his work. He begins with acknowledgments to Mary and their children, and he explains how two photographs make one point about footprints, the leopard, the giraffe, and the stability of quadripeds on the ground. He describes a career spanning more than four decades and says he enjoyed the freedom of a university professor, surrounded by inquisitive, bright students who appreciated learning. He recalls his start at MIT in thermodynamics and cryogenics, the difficult time getting a position, rejections, and how a book was published, which led to entropy generation minimization and textbooks in thermodynamics and heat transfer. He says what really matters is configuration, and he connects this to convection, freedom of the flow architecture, and a line of design science books. He ends with a punchline about a school of thought associated with Duke, the primordial presence of the idea before observation, and conferences from Duke to Paris and London.
Bejan shows footprints of a leopard and says the rear foot touches the spot left by the front paw on the same side of the body. He says the giraffe photograph shows the same thing, and he connects it to extreme stability per unit weight of design.
He says the recipe for an individual's happy and creative life is freedom and humility, surrounded by inquisitive, bright students appreciative of learning. He points to the Duke student who comes voluntarily to be shaped in life.
Bejan describes the book cover as an accident from Africa, with an Egyptian goose on a branch, which he recognized as Adrian. He calls this an individual investigator standing on dead wood with infinite freedom to the blue sky of ideas.
He recalls training at MIT and work in cryogenics, then a postdoc in Berkeley, and being hired at the University of Colorado. He says a book led to entropy generation minimization, and he connects thermodynamics and heat transfer to configuration and convection.
Bejan says this kind of thinking represents a school of thought associated with Duke and calls it thermodynamics of 2026, tied to design in nature or constructal law. He says the idea is the fastest and cheapest investigation method, and he mentions the 16th Constructal Law Conference in Paris and the next year at Imperial College in London.
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