As one advances their progress along their engineering journey, it quickly becomes evident that practical ability alone defines the prowess of an engineer. Week after week, month after month we walk into labs, perform our dedicated assignment, and with a slight skip to our step, walk our merry way out. This is perfectly adequate, and no one can fault another for these actions, Certainly, I can’t either without espousing staggering amounts of hypocrisy. But just for one second, as you walk into these labs, take a look at the name of the room. Rajagiri has named several of their laboratories after the discipline which they serve, for example, the Communications Lab, The Logic Design Lab, and The Signal Processing Lab, however apart from these, Rajagiri has chosen, in my opinion, a very admirable system of nomenclature. These labs are named after some of the most influential scientists, physicists, mathematicians, and of course, engineers in modern history. We thought it would be fitting to pay tribute to these giants of our fields, the shoulders upon which it becomes easier to see the remarkable futures that we are destined to strive towards, depredating struggles and in certain cases even saving humanity.
As an electronics student, I am compelled to start with a personal hero of mine. The Turing Lab is named after English cryptanalyst Alan Turing. Turing stands as one of the most tragic heroes of the scientific world. A true mathematical prodigy, wartime cryptographer, and progressive visionary, Turing helped defeat Nazi Germany by cracking their seemingly unbreakable Enigma encryption system. But his contributions go far beyond his legendary wartime heroism. His theoretical model of the “Turing machine” laid the groundwork for a vast amount of modern computation, and his speculations on artificial intelligence remain chillingly prophetic.
Every student in RSET at one point in time must enter Zuse Lab, be it to complete their C Programming Lab or at the behest of a professor intent on making you take a printout of their notes, be that as it may, very few know the origin of the name, with some erroneously making an analogy to the Greek god of Lightning chalking the aberration in spellings up to a typing mistake. Konrad Zuse’s name, regrettably, doesn’t quite enjoy the same spotlight as other computing giants, though it very much should. In the midst of war-torn Germany, this lone engineer had the audacity to build the world’s first programmable computer—the Z3—in 1941. A machine entirely ahead of its time, it could execute sequences of operations autonomously. And as if that wasn’t enough, Zuse later devised Plankalkül, the first high-level programming language, years before anyone else dared imagine such a concept. He worked in obscurity for too long, and history took its sweet time acknowledging his role in birthing modern computing. A pioneer in every sense, Zuse deserves more than just a footnote in the great digital narrative.
We now move on to Kleinrock Lab, Leonard Kleinrock, yet another name that perhaps doesn’t quite leap out from the pages of technological history, yet it should. Kleinrock’s work laid the foundation for the very backbone of the modern world—packet-switched networks, or as we now call it, the Internet. In 1961, while others still fiddled with more pedestrian means of communication, Kleinrock introduced the groundbreaking concept of packet switching in his doctoral thesis. This idea—of breaking data into packets for more efficient transmission—would become the bedrock of ARPANET, the Internet’s forebear. On October 29, 1969, Kleinrock’s lab at UCLA hosted the first message ever sent over this nascent network. It was supposed to say “LOGIN,” but only the letters “LO” made it through before the system crashed. A fitting metaphor, perhaps, for how the greatest achievements often emerge not fully formed but staggered by failure before reaching their apogee.
Once again I must confess that my biases are toward Electronics, as someone deeply interested in the field of Large Scale Integration, one owes an enormous debt of gratitude towards several giants, including Jack Kilby, Robert Noyce, Carver Mead, and John Ambrose Fleming. These names would however be nearly a footnote in history if it weren’t for the work of the Namesake of the Shockley Lab. William Shockley was a physicist of towering intellect and, alas, no shortage of arrogance (and racism). Co-creator of the transistor—arguably the single most important invention in modern electronics—Shockley earned his place in the pantheon of technological pioneers. Sharing the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics didn’t seem to soothe his restless ego; he went on to found Shockley Semiconductor, a venture that kickstarted what we now pretentiously call Silicon Valley.
With the unfortunate later years of Shockley, I propose we discuss a genius much more interested in amusing his own humor rather than discrimination. Moving to Shannon Lab, here we have Claude Shannon, the whimsical mathematician whose genius reshaped our understanding of information itself. Shannon’s 1948 paper on information theory didn’t just propose a new way of thinking—it defined the digital age before most had even imagined such a thing. Bits, entropy, data compression—all these wonders owe their lineage to this man. Yet Shannon, being cut from an altogether different cloth, was not content with pure intellectual glory. He spent his time riding unicycles down the corridors of MIT and building quirky machines for no purpose other than his own amusement. He might have proved once and for all that brilliance need not be joyless. For limitless fun please take a few minutes and read about Shannon’s ingenious Mighty Mouse, Theseus.
Werner Heisenberg, giving his name to the Heisenberg Lab, was one of the towering figures of 20th-century physics. He is indubitably remembered not only for his profound intellect but also for the unsettling implications of his most famous contribution—the uncertainty principle. This cornerstone of quantum mechanics posits, to the dismay of classical determinists, that the more precisely one measures a particle’s position, the less precisely one can know its momentum. Heisenberg’s work shattered the Newtonian dream of a perfectly predictable universe, replacing it with a world governed by probabilities and inherent limitations of knowledge. For this, he shared a place in the Nobel pantheon at the age of 31. Yet Heisenberg’s legacy, like many of his era, is complicated. His wartime role in Nazi Germany’s atomic research raises questions that remain unanswered. Was he a reluctant patriot or a passive enabler? Whatever the answer, his scientific brilliance is undeniable—he brought us closer to understanding the quantum world while reminding us of the limits of human comprehension
Last, but certainly not least we must discuss the Codd Lab, Edgar F. Codd is a name that I was not familiar with before writing this paper. To understand his magnitude, I approached a relative in the field of Data Science. It became evident that Codd’s name is one database theorists whisper with massive reverence. He single-handedly reshaped how humanity organizes and accesses its ever-growing troves of information. His 1970 paper on relational database management wasn’t just a contribution—it was a true upheaval, a revolution if you will. Before Codd, data storage was an unruly mess; after Codd, it was neat, tabular, and astonishingly efficient. SQL and every other relational database owe their existence to his mind’s labor. Yet, like so many brilliant minds, he battled bureaucracy and skeptics, who initially failed to grasp the magnitude of his achievement. Today, his work quietly powers the very infrastructure of our digital world, and one suspects he would find some irony in being recognized too late.
I must conclude by issuing an apology. Each of these individuals deserves far more than just a paragraph to their name, their contributions have shaped our understanding of engineering and progressed their fields to Herculean proportions (I see you Hercules Lab, which was named after the Greek hero, not an engineer). To further honor their legacy I would highly recommend reading more about them and understanding their work, several of them received very little praise during their lives, and some, including the legendary Alan Turing were even discriminated against ruthlessly, and to make up for that let us adapt their advances onto our own work, or at the very least look at their names above the lab’s doors in reverence as we walk in after a tiring night of (somewhat procrastinated) writing lab records.
