https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/engineering-beauty-and-a-longing-for-the-infinite/ > In July 2019, I embarked upon a six-day excursion across Italy with 14 undergraduate students and three professors from Princeton University. The trip was part of a six-week summer course titled “Two Millennia of Structural Architecture in Italy.” Given the title, it should come as no surprise that the instructors were professors, not of architecture or history but of civil engineering. > Humans are born with a desire for beauty, but that desire, like any desire, needs to be nurtured—cultivated like a garden. Any good education must include an education in beauty; likewise, any field of knowledge that is stripped of the beauty of its object, whether that be a machine, a book or a person’s life, will be stripped of its mystery. As made clear in the experiences of famous scientists captured in the book by Marco Bersanelli and Mario Gargantini, From Galileo to Gell-Mann: The Wonder that Inspired the Greatest Scientists of All Time: In Their Own Words, studying the natural world sparks awe and wonder.