I just want to focus on two of my awesome professors who are on opposite sides of the spectrum: Beazley and Babai.

Beazley gave a lecture today on "The Big Picture" - it's his last lecture at the UofC, and since he's not planning to return to academia anytime soon, probably his last lecture in a while. He talked about what it means to be a Hacker, and how he originally wanted to introduce more hacking to the UofC. It was extremely inspirational: we were all lamenting afterwards that nobody videotaped it. It's too bad you missed it, Ryo, you would have really enjoyed it. He talked about the traits of hackers, pinpointing as most important Curiosity, Tenacity/Focus, Distrust for Authority, and an Open Mind. He talked about good software, bad software, and how you should write lots of bad software so you can debug it. It's a little hard to convey properly, but we were thinking we should have a Beazley Memorial lecture in the Maclab every quarter to promote hacking... I think we should call the Maclab cadre of budding hackers something like "Beazley's Bots". You know, keep the legend alive.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Babai, who won the Quantrell Award for Undergraduate Teaching. He definitely deserves it, I'm fairly surprised he didn't get it already. He's on the opposite end because while Beazley is a Hacker, Babai is a Computer Scientist. In between you have coders, programmers, engineers, developers, etc. But these two ends are the polar opposites, where one values results and the other theory, but what they have in common is brilliance, enthusiasm, and doing things for the sheer joy of testing the limits of our understanding. Babai makes the most abstract things suddenly clear, almost tangible, and you see strange connections. Why is it that statistical independence is related to linear independence? Well, when you apply the linear algebra method to combinatorics, it makes sense. Ahh! So awesome.

I'd actually propose a triangle for understanding the software field, rather than just a continuum. One corner is the Hacker, one is the Computer Scientist, and one is the Software Artist. I like Ryo's description of this. They're really just different aesthetics: one finds things beautiful when they are good "hacks" - they see elegance in a solution that pushes limits of physical possibility; one sees beauty in the theoretical aspects of software, the way it fits together in a logical and mathematical framework; the other sees beauty in the possibility of what their work can actually affect, the way it will touch people or shape communities, in a sense using their software as a brush on the canvas of the world.

I'm not sure which one I am right now.