One of the points that President Hockfield made at the MIT reunion was how geography influenced creativity. The fact that MIT is largely one big building made it possible for ideas to flow from one part to another. There is an interesting corrolary to this and that is that there may be conversations that should be going on which are inhibited because of the way that the architecture of the place is laid out.
For example, if you look at the people in the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at MIT at
http://lfe.mit.edu/
you'll see Sloan Management people, EECS people, and Cognitive science people. You don't see physics people or math people. This makes a lot of sense if you plot the location of the Sloan school, EECS department, and Cognitive science on a map of MIT, and also plot the locations of the math and physics department. And it also influences the direction of the research. It's very interesting to compare the differences between the MIT seminars and the mathematical finance seminars at the University of Texas at Austin
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/Seminars/MathFin/
