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L. Mahadevan smiled at the question, which was: "What, exactly, do you do?" It is, on the surface, a simple question, but for Mahadevan the answer could lead many places. Or, maybe, that's the answer, that Mahadevan, a 43-year-old professor at Harvard, studies seemingly simple, everyday questions - such as, how does fabric drape? paper wrinkle? paint dry? -and hopes that they may lead to new places in science.
"I'm a wanderer," Mahadevan said. "I tend to be maybe too curious about too many things. And most of the time I fail in satisfying that curiosity. But," he said, as he raised the eyebrows on his boyish face, "one curiosity leads to another."
Harvard lists Mahadevan as a professor of applied mathematics. But he's also a physicist. And an engineer. And he holds appointments in Harvard's biology department. He is, he finally concludes, "just a scientist," whose interest is a world where "everything is a puzzle of why and how and what."
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