Emeritus: John Heywood
Editor’s note: This is part of a series of articles linking the work of MIT’s emeritus faculty members with the current state of research in their given fields. When it comes to understanding the inner workings of the engines that propel most of the world’s cars and trucks, John Heywood SM ’62 PhD ’65, MIT’s Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Emeritus, wrote the book: His textbook, Internal Combustion Engine Fundamentals (McGraw Hill), which has sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide since its publication in 1988 after a dozen years of work, has become the standard text in the field.While many people today see internal combustion engines as dinosaurs that are on their way out, rendered obsolete by global warming and the escalating price of oil, Heywood sees them as something we’ll be living with for a long time to come — having learned how slowly habits change when it...