UCC honours science pioneers with honorary degrees

Local and global science education pioneers are to be awarded honorary doctoral degrees by University College Cork next week.

They include a 93-year-old nun who was central to the development of science teaching in Cork and nationally in the 1950s and 1960s.

The ongoing celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of the George Boole — the former UCC maths professor whose ideas are credited as underpinning modern computer technology — sees a technological focus among the two international recipients selected to be conferred.

Anant Agarwal has been named in the list of top 15 education innovators by Forbes, having taught the first course on massive open online course (MOOC) provider called edX.

He is now chief executive of edX, which has more than 5m students around the world, as well as professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which founded edX along with Harvard University.

Before being conferred with an honorary doctor of science degree, Mr Agarwal will deliver the first of the Boole Shannon Lecture Series, a joint initiative between MIT and UCC to celebrate the contributions to maths, computer science and engineering of Boole and Claude Shannon.

Also being conferred as a doctor of science will be Donald Knuth, widely considered the father of the analysis of algorithms. More than a million copies have been sold of his book, The Art of Computer Programming, which refer more than 700 times to George Boole or concepts named after him.

“I share his great love for using algebra to understand complex ideas,” Mr Knuth said of UCC’s first professor of maths.

UCC

Boole’s biographer and UCC emeritus professor of maths Desmond McHale will receive an honorary degree of doctor of literature.

“Everyone in the world now has heard about George Boole and his link with Cork. He produced some of his greatest work here,” he said.

A century after Boole taught at UCC, Sr Mercedes Desmond — who will receive an honorary doctor of education degree — began her teaching career in the nearby St Aloysius School in Cork City. From 1949 until her appointment as principal in 1978, the Sister of Mercy nun taught physics, chemistry, maths, and physiology before biology was introduced as a second-level subject.

She was one of a small group who founded the Irish Science Teachers’ Association (ISTA) in 1962, and organised courses for teachers in everything from glass-blowing and electronics to ecology and astronomy.

On Wednesday November 4, Mr Knuth will give a public lecture and answer audience questions at a UCC event.