Fiction
Books
I grew up wanting to be a writer. (My mother was a teacher and avid reader of good literature.) But a friend of the family, a bull-of -the-woods machinist, said “Jack should go to M.I.T.” So I tossed out all the liberal arts college catalogs I had sent for, and applied to M.I.T. When you’re at South High School in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1948, and you’re the first to ever get accepted at M.I.T., you go. The first A I got there, however, was in English Composition.
After my engineering career wound down, I began to try to write fiction. A passionate search for my secret Welsh grandfather provided motivation and content for family history novels (not all fiction). I tried murder mysteries, but the books were commercially unsuccessful. There are some short stories, and I’m told some are pretty good. Finally, there is novel about a small town struggling to survive surrounded by a crumbling American society. If I live long enough, I have no doubt I will try again.
Technical
Books
How does one marry an engineering career with a frustrated desire to write? Answer: You write engineering books. But you don’t write traditional engineering books; you forge new pathways.
Each of my technical books was something different: a new approach to design, a new way of doing the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a new organization for viewing math problem-solving, teaching probability and Bayes’ Rule by programmed instruction, and integrating design with manufacturing.
Research
Papers
Selected Papers from a Decade of Research into Artificial Intelligence Applied to Engineering Design:
Designing With Features, Iterative Redesign, Representing Designs, Evaluating Manufacturability, Parametric, Configuration, and Conceptual Design.
John R. Dixon 