The Sigma Mu emblem is a modified version of the McGill University emblem; martlets set free and crowns removed.
McGill’s emblem was chosen since it was the place where Sigma Mu founded its first section. The martlets as mentioned, were removed because they simply have no link whatsoever with Mechanical Engineering, not to mention that they aren’t real birds; three gears have replaced them.
Gears are an internationally recognized symbol representing Mechanical Engineers. They are the essence of Mechanical Engineering. For a long time the locomotive was the symbol of Mechanical Engineering, however, the locomotive, while being quite mechanical, no doubt, relates back to the day where Railroad Engineering was an existing field. Alas, Railroad Engineering was split evenly and distributed both to Mechanical and Civil Engineering due to the infrastructure involved. The locomotive was therefore replaced by gears in order to alleviate the association between Mechanical and Civil Engineering. Regretfully however, still today in some institutions, the locomotive is wrongly displayed as the symbol for Mechanical Engineering.
The crowns were removed from the McGill logo and have instead been replaced by the Greek letters that make our name.
The letters Sigma and Mu were chosen because they have key meanings for Mechanical Engineers. Firstly the Greek letters remind us of our omnipresent and important use of Greek symbols in our field. As most of us know, Sigma represents the summation, which lays the bricks of our foundations as we constantly use these sums to achieve equilibrium in forces and moments. Mu represents one of the most basic and most important coefficients in Mechanical Engineering and in life, the coefficient of friction.
The three peaks in the logo now represent the three most important principles in Mechanical Engineering. Namely, Newton's First and Second Laws and the Bernoulli Equation.
The logos have been redesigned from their older version by Jean-Luc Mainville, and we are gratefull to him for the time he gave Sigma Mu for doing this.
Merci Jean-Luc!
