My name is Michael McEllin, and I am a retired nuclear engineer, though for most of my career I was perhaps best described as computational physicist. That is, I constructed computer programs to solve the physics problems associated with operating nuclear reactors. (You can find my professional CV here. I also have a LinkedIn page.)
In my 1960s northern grammar school education an unfortunate aspect of being good at subjects like maths and physics was automatic exclusion from subjects like art and music. Frivolous artistic pursuits were only for those unsuited to the more serious academic subjects. I could never claim any musical talent, but it was arguable that my artistic capabilities were relatively on a par with my abilities at maths and science, so I now think that this exclusive focus was wrong. I do not regret my scientific and engineering career (and it was probably much more lucrative than life as an artist), but definitive choices should not be enforced at such an early stage. Furthermore, I now believe that engineers are better engineers if they have some appreciation of aesthetics (a view that would not have appeared at all strange to Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi and Sir Christopher Wren). Nevertheless, art had to be put aside, and was largely forgotten for a decade or more.
I did very little art till I emerged from the academic world and moved to take up a research and development job at Berkeley Nuclear Laboratories in Gloucestershire. I now had to create a social life in the unfamiliar city of Bristol. My landlady told me about the "Folk House" - an establishment in the city center where one could take heavily subsidised evening classes (a scene that is regrettably now long gone) and also find a social hub, with regular caileighs and a Sunday rambling group.
At this point I remembered my long-forgotten pleasure in art and signed on for life-drawing. Dave Paskett tutored the classes: he later became president of the Royal Watercolour Society, so we were luckier than we knew at the time. In fact, we did know that we were on to a good thing, because mostly the same people kept returning year after year, and when the local authorities started to withdraw the class subsidies, we formed ourselves into a group to hire a model (mostly Heidi) using a rota of our homes in which to gather each week. Overall we stayed together for perhaps a decade, until the random currents of life started to disperse people out of Bristol. (Dave moved to Hong Kong for a while - hence his stunning serious of watercolours from China.)
Marriage, family etc. etc..... followed and art was mainly on the back-burner again, though not entirely absent. My wife and I had met on a walking holiday, and even when encumbered by young children we always went to the wild places of the UK for our breaks. I usually carried a small sketchbook in my rucksack, which came out whenever there seemed to be a reasonable chance to look and draw.
Retirement seemed like a good opportunity to start taking art seriously again (and having dropped a hint, my retirement present was an excellent set of sable watercolour brushes). I also restarted life classes.
About the same time I came across the theme of generative art/design: using computational algorithms to build images that would probably not be creatable by any traditional methods. There were several reasons why looking into this area seemed like a good idea. Firstly, 38 years of doing serious mathematics and writing computer programs meant that I already understood the mathematical concepts at a deep level and I was extremely fluent in the techniques: if my imagination could conceive of an image, I could probably find out how to implement it fairly quickly without too many frustrating false steps.
I also had a wider purpose. I knew from my experience mentoring graduates in my later years of work that in spite of the huge dependence of the modern world on computing the education system was failing to produce students who understood (or had any inclination to understand) the important craft of programming and its associated mental skills. (I was not alone in this perception: bodies as distinguished as the Royal Society were pointing out that computing in schools though well intended had somehow gone badly wrong.) The outcome of industry pressure and this inquiry was a new schools computing curriculum in which computational thinking - including programming - had a larger share. (I have been supporting this in a small way by running Barefoot Computing workshops for primary teachers.)
I also wished to see whether using computing to support a manifestly purely creative activity could tempt a new audience to explore some of the techniques of computing and perhaps before they knew it pick up some of the underlying mathematical ideas. For some years I have been visiting schools as a Science/Technology/Engineering/Maths (STEM) ambassador and I and other ambassadors were very aware that the maths part of STEM was somewhat under-promoted, partly because of the difficulty of communicating abstract ideas in a concrete way. Did we now have a tool that could reach students other methods left cold? Time will tell.