On the fifth of October, at 2 o’clock in room no. 207 of the law building, the future = science + art seminar was held by the Specialized Advanced Imaging Research Center. The lecturer was professor Won Gwang-yeoun of the Graduate School of Culture Technology at KAIST and winner of the 2010 outstanding leader award. Despite the fact that there were more empty seats than filled ones, there was still quite an audience considering the size of the seminar room, the fact that the beginning time was 2 o’clock, and that most of the people who participated were grad students and professors from the engineering department.
Professor Won lectured mostly about converging the arts and the sciences, what it has currently achieved, what we can expect to experience in the future and the difficulties it is currently facing. But there was also a Q&A time where the professor sat comfortably facing the students. One of his answers was rather memorable,
“When I was at Harvard as a researcher, I abhorred it when other nobel-prize winning researchers came and asked to have lunch with me. It was like I was sitting on a pin-cushion all the time. But through that experience and a lot of listening, I noticed something interesting. It was the fact that a nobel-prize winner’s ability to solve questions had little difference with mine and most researchers in the world. Koreans, who have studied the “Math’s Jung-suk” have brilliant problem solving abilities. What I noticed was that the difference was not made there but it was made on how they asked questions. Basically, when they approached maths questions or looked for alternative solutions, I noticed that they had a broad knowledge of humanity and that is what made all the difference.”