Reading the Ahmet Cemal Eringen ph.d. dissertation title gave me impostor syndrome in a language I don't even speak

[PatrickRR]

I'm sitting in my continuum mechanics seminar (yes, I'm that person who takes electives just because they sound impressive), and my professor starts talking about the history of the field. He puts a slide up with a name: Ahmet Cemal Eringen. Born in Kayseri, Turkey, 1921. Technical University of Istanbul. Then Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn for Ph.D. in 1948 .

And then he shows us the dissertation title.

I literally wrote it down in my notebook because I needed to process it word by word:

"Solution of the Two-dimensional Mixed-mixed Boundary Value Problem of Elasticity For Rectangular, Orthotropic Media And Application To The Buckling Of Sandwich Beams"

I counted. It's 27 words if you include the "and." TWENTY-SEVEN. And here's the thing—I understood maybe half of them individually, but together? They form this beautiful, terrifying monument to everything I don't know about mechanics.

"Mixed-mixed boundary value problem"—okay, I know what boundary conditions are. But MIXED-MIXED? That's apparently a thing. "Orthotropic media"—materials with different properties in different directions, got it. But putting it all together with "rectangular" geometry AND "sandwich beams" AND "buckling"? This man wasn't just writing a dissertation; he was writing the table of contents for the next fifty years of his research career. And he did it in 1948. Before computers. Before MATLAB. Before calculators existed the way we know them.

My professor mentioned that Eringen went on to become a professor at Princeton, founded the Society of Engineering Science, and now there's a whole medal named after him . He published papers on everything from nonlocal elasticity to micromorphic electromagnetic theory to bone modeling . BONE MODELING. In the 2000s. While he was in his eighties .

And here I am, struggling to write a 10-page literature review.

The worst part? English wasn't even his first language. He was Turkish. He did his undergraduate work in Istanbul, came to the US for graduate studies, and wrote THAT title in a language he probably hadn't been speaking for more than a few years . Meanwhile, I've spoken English my whole life and I still can't write a title that long without a grammatical error.

If you need me, I'll be in the corner questioning all my life choices. Anyone else have academic heroes who make you feel simultaneously inspired and completely inadequate?

 

[LarryNolk]

I had this exact feeling when I first read Claude Shannon's master's thesis title: "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits." It was 1940. He was 24. He basically invented digital circuit design theory out of nowhere while getting a master's degree. A MASTER'S.

I sat in my dorm room and thought, "What have I done with my life?" I was 22 and couldn't even fix my wifi.

But here's what I've learned since then: genius isn't about being born different. It's about showing up, obsessively, for decades. Eringen's 1948 dissertation is amazing, but so is the fact that he published on bone modeling in the 2000s, in his eighties. That's not just intelligence—that's discipline. That's a lifetime of showing up.

You're in a continuum mechanics seminar. You understood half the terms in a 1948 dissertation title. You're not behind—you're exactly where you need to be. The giants aren't there to make you feel small.