Prof McCarthy

Prof McCarthy is the username for J. Michael McCarthy, Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering of the University of California, Irvine. He is the Henry Samueli Professor and Director of the Center for Engineering Science in Design.

My collection of resources for education in mechanical design is available at mechanicaldesign101.com.

I have found that my students regularly use Wikipedia for an introduction to topics in machines and mechanisms. Wikipedia is often the first entry in a Google search on these topics, which means that many others rely on it as well. For this reason, I now take the time to edit articles on machines so they match more closely to our current understanding, while being respectful of the contributions of others.

This effort has brought me into contact with a number of diligent individuals in the Wikipedia community. It is clear, that as with many things, the true strength of an organization is the quality and commitment of the individuals who support it.

I suspect my revisions to the Wikipedia article Simple machines, Work (physics) and Moment of Inertia, and other articles that link to these, even with their flaws, have done more to improve the understanding of machine theory than anything in my years of research and teaching, including several books and editorship of scholarly journals, simply because these articles are viewed by thousands every day.