HeyJaredWhere What If Becomes What's Next
Welcome to Season 3 of WHERE WHAT IF BECOMES WHAT’S NEXT. As Carnegie Mellon University celebrates its 125th anniversary, we’re spotlighting 15 CMU inventions that changed the world.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 16, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 9, 2026
Latest episodes
Reinventing Animation: The Story Behind Toy Story (opens the original)
Read excerpt
How does a filmmaker who had no interest in computers end up producing the first computer-animated feature film – a movie that would change animation forever? That movie was “Toy Story,” and this is the story of the filmmaker, the technologies, and the people who made this groundbreaking movie possible. Before 1995, every animated feature was drawn by hand, frame by painstaking frame. Then Pixar's “Toy Story” arrived and rewrote the rules. In this episode, we trace that revolution through the ey
Materials Science: From Silly Putty to Self-Healing Robots (opens the original)
Read excerpt
A failed rubber substitute. A cloudy liquid that looked like a mistake. A robot that heals itself. This episode looks at three chapters in Carnegie Mellon University's long history of materials science: two born from happy accidents, and one built entirely on purpose. The first is Silly Putty. In the early 1940s, Carnegie Tech alumni Earl Warrick and Rob Roy McGregor were trying to invent a wartime rubber substitute. What they got instead was a strange, bouncy compound with no obvious purpose. B
Imagining the Future: One Story at a Time (opens the original)
Read excerpt
What happens when a kid who devours science fiction novels grows up to earn a PhD in robotics — and then writes the books he once dreamed of? Daniel H. Wilson, a Cherokee citizen and Carnegie Mellon University alumnus, has spent his career moving between two worlds: building intelligent machines and imagining what they might become. Wilson earned his master's in machine learning and PhD in robotics at CMU, drawn by the university's curiosity-driven culture. He wrote his first book, How to Surviv
Bold Strokes: Making the Ordinary Pop (opens the original)
Read excerpt
What if the coffee cup on your desk or the ketchup bottle in your fridge could become a symbol recognized around the world? For pop artist and Carnegie Mellon University alum Burton Morris , that's not a hypothetical — it's a career. In this episode, Morris traces his path from a Pittsburgh childhood spent drawing his favorite superheroes, to pre-college art classes on Carnegie Mellon's campus, to becoming one of America's best-known contemporary pop artists. He credits CMU's fine arts and graph
A New Equation: Teaching Math for an AI World (opens the original)
Read excerpt
What is the purpose of learning math in a world where AI can solve any equation in seconds? Carnegie Mellon mathematician Po-Shen Loh has spent his career arguing that math was never really about memorizing formulas — it's about learning how to think. In this episode, part of CMU's series spotlighting 15 inventions from its 125th anniversary, Loh traces his path from solving childhood math puzzles to leading the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad team to four world championships, not by fo
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
No verified audience measurement yet.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.