"Jesse Ventura famously remarked that religion is 'a crutch for weak-minded people.' Jesse, of course, was a bit rough around the edges. But many more sophisticated people share his opinion. In their view, being a religious believer and a thinking person is a contradiction in terms.
Clearly, these folks have never met Rutherford Aris. Aris is a scientist of dazzling brilliance -- a chemical engineer whose mathematical models revolutionized his field -- and a deeply devout Christian. From 1958 to 1996, when he retired, he was one of the University of Minnesota's brightest stars, a primary reason that its chemical engineering graduate program is ranked No. 1 in the nation by the National Research Council.
'Aris thought in a dimension that none of us ordinary folks were capable of,' says colleague Lanny Schmidt, himself an eminent scientist. A mathematical wizard, Aris went straight into industry at 16 after graduating from high school in his home country of England. He never formally attended college -- getting his degree in mathematics with highest honors by correspondence -- and wrote his Ph.D. thesis in six weeks. As a young man, his groundbreaking papers made waves internationally.
Remarkably, Aris held a joint appointment at the university in the Department of Classics and Near Eastern Studies. An avid lover of medieval manuscripts, he scoured French and Italian monasteries for his work on Latin scripts. Aris is a prolific poet, author of 16 books and author or coauthor of 300 technical papers."
