*Concerns of Young Mathematicians* Volume 3, Issue 12 Mar. 29, 1995 An electronically distributed digest for discussions of the issues of concern to mathematicians at the beginning of their careers. Please, direct submissions and questions to Kevin Madigan madigan@math.nwu.edu , editor for the month of April. Next issue: Wednesday, April 5th, 1995. February Editor: Nancy Wilson nwilson@stmarys-ca.edu March Editor: Wendy Brunzie brunzie@math.montana.edu April Editor: Kevin Madigan madigan@math.nwu.edu To subscribe: Contact Charles Yeomans at cyeomans@ms.uky.edu Back issues and other information are available via anonymous FTP to ftp.ms.uky.edu, in pub3/mailing.lists/ymn-list. Or connect to the YMN homepage on the WWW, the URL: http://math34.gatech.edu:8080/YMN/ymn.html The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the administrative board or membership of the Young Mathematicians' Network. The editorial policy of this newsletter is to encourage discussion of issues, and facilitate the dissemination of information, relevant to the concerns of young mathematicians. Table of Contents Item # Title ------ ----- 1 Editor's Notes. 2 A Letter to the Editor. 3 The Classifieds 4 Interview with Tom Davis at SGI. 5 A Joke to the Editor. 6 Closing Credits. _______________________________________________________________ Item #1 Editor's notes: Hi, folks. This is the last week of my tenure as editor of the month. (Crowd roars). It's a bit on the short side, but it does contain a very informative interview with Tom Davis at SGI, answering the same questions I put to Jim Phillips at Boeing last week. I want to thank Tom for putting in the time to answer those questions so thoroughly and I hope others find his advice helpful. In the near future, one of the CoYMN editors who recently successfully made the switch from academia to industry will submit an article detailing his experiences. It should be very interesting to hear the inside story of this transition. I hope you all have enjoyed reading the Concerns this month. Editing is a nice, creative process: I encourage everyone to volunteer for this task and to present your own angle on our concerns. - Wendy Brunzie Editor of the Month of March brunzie@math.montana.edu _______________________________________________________________ Item #2 Letter to the Editor Those of us lucky enough to have secured a position for the fall already are probably experiencing an annoying phenomenon: receiving rejection letters from places to which we sent letters of withdrawal many weeks ago. What can be done about this problem? I don't think I'm just being an obnoxious whiner to bring this up, because surely it is in the interests of hiring committees to encourage applicants to inform them when they secure a post elsewhere. But the practice of ignoring withdrawal letters encourages exactly the opposite. - Tim tycchow@math.mit.ed ______________________________________________________________ Item #3 The Classifieds Two books are available which may be of interest to YMN members involved with undergraduate teaching. Groups and Symmetry by David Farmer Knots and Surfaces by David Farmer and Ted Stanford Each book is appropriate for a one-semester course at the BEGINNING undergraduate level. (Do not confuse these with other books having similar names!) The main feature of both books is a collection of Tasks which lead the student to experiment and discover mathematics. Each new topic is introduced by a series of examples. The ideas behind the examples are discussed in the text, and the Tasks occur as a natural part of the development of the mathematics. The book is designed so that the students work on the Tasks at home. During `lecture' the class works toward finding, describing, and justifying the patterns behind the examples from the Tasks. A typical class begins with the instructor spending 5-10 minutes giving a summary of previous work and reminding everybody of the current status of the questions they are trying to answer. Then 5-30 minutes are spent on student descriptions of the work they did since the previous meeting. The rest of the time is spend making conjectures, testing the conjectures, fixing or abandoning those which are wrong, and trying to justify the various rules which the class has devised. Class ends with a list of new Tasks designed to help resolve the questions which arose during this lecture, or which remain unanswered from previous classes. On a good day the instructor does nothing more than write student comments on the board. The students quickly notice that they can't explain their discoveries unless they use language precisely, and definitions arise only when there is a clear need. There is very little presentation of dry facts for the students to `learn.' The books grew out of courses developed at Columbia University, and are currently used as texts at Columbia University and Smith College. The courses based on these books are aimed at non-science majors who want to fulfill a math requirement. Both the idea of mathematical discovery and the collaborative nature of the course are very different from any math class the students have taken before. They become interested in the mathematics, and the class is enjoyable for both the student and the instructor. Creating a course based on one of these books will put you in good favor with some of the senior people in your department, it will look good on your vita, and it will be a lot of fun (and not too much work). The books are `ready to go,' and you will not need to do all the work of creating a course from scratch. The authors are available to answer questions and give advice. The books are still undergoing revision. All comments are welcome. How can you get a copy? The preferred method is for me to email you a few postscript files which you would preview or print on your local laserprinter (each book is about 100 pages). If this is not possible, then other arrangements can be made. David Farmer farmer@msri.org ******************************************** CALL FOR PAPERS (submission by Charles Yeomans) Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering Women's Research Institute Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Carol J. Burger, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief The Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering is pleased to report a successful first year of publication. The first issue was published in June, 1994. The second and third issues have gone to press and the fourth issue is in process. We wish to thank all those who have contributed papers, volunteered to be reviewers and requested subscriptions during this first year of publication. You have made the Journal a reality! We now call for submissions for the second year of publication. We would also like to identify those interested in reviewing papers. The purpose of the Journal is to publish original, peer-reviewed papers that report innovative ideas and programs, scientific studies, and formulation of concepts related to the education, recruitment, and retention of underrepresented groups in science and engineering. Issues related to women and minorities in science and engineering are consolidated to address the entire professional and educational environment. Sample contents of Volume 1 includes: "Implications of Feminist Critiques of Science for the Teaching of Mathematics and Science by Bonnie Jean Shulman; "The Effect of Inquiry Activities on Elementary Students' Enjoyment, Ease and Confidence in Doing Science: An Analysis by Sex and Race" by Jane Butler Kahle and Arta Damnjanovic; "Engineering, Education and Minorities: Where Now?" by Norman Fortenberry; "Characteristics and Educational Experiences of High-Achieving Minority Secondary Students in Science and Mathematics by Samuel S. Peng and Susan Hill; "Retaining Tomorrow's Scientists: Exploring the Factors that Keep Male and Female College Students Interested in Science" by Linda J. Sax; "Racial/Ethnic and Gender Differences in Science Achievement of Nine, Thirteen and Seventeen-year Old Students" by Barbara Bruschi and Bernice Taylor Anderson; "The Baccalaureate Origins of Chicana and Chicano Doctorates in the Physical, Life, and Engineering Sciences: l980-1990" by Daniel Solorzano; Subjects for papers submitted can include: empirical studies of current qualitative or quantitative research; historical investigations of how minority status impacts science and engineering; original theoretical or conceptual analyses of feminist science and Afrocentric science; reviews of literature to help develop new ideas and directions for future research; explorations of feminist teaching methods, black student/white teacher interactions; cultural phenomena that affect the classroom climate. To receive guidelines for manuscript preparation or to submit a curriculum vita if you are interested in reviewing papers for the journal contact: Kathy Wager, Editorial Assistant Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering Women's Research Institute Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University 10 Sandy Hall, Room 10 Blacksburg, VA 244061-0338 Phone: 703-231-6296 Fax: 703 231-7669 E-mail: JRLWMSE@VT.EDU SUBSCRIPTIONS AND REQUESTS FOR SAMPLE COPIES are being handled by the publisher, Begell House, Inc. To subscribe, send a letter with check payable to Begell House, Inc. to Mr. Jung Ra, Begell House, Inc. 79 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016-7892. Institutional rate: $75.00; Individual rate: $40.00. Individual rate must be paid by personal check, and is available to home address only. ______________________________________________________________ Item #4 An Interview with Tom Davis at SGI Prologue: Just as general interest, here's my background: I've got a PhD in mathematics from Stanford, nad did a post-doc for about 3 years in EE, also at Stanford. I taught some math and computer science in small colleges for a couple of years, and since then, I've worked in industry -- first for a company that did an office automation system, and for the last 13 years at Silicon Graphics where we're most famous for our graphics workstations. Silicon Graphics employs about 5000 people world-wide, of whom perhaps 1200 are in engineering -- about 700 in software and 500 in hardware. I work primarily on graphics software. Some of the comments below may seem a bit negative, but I really love math, and always have. I still teach some volunteer math classes, read math books, work on problems/puzzles, and so on. It's just that a lot of the things I love don't help anybody make any money, so industry's not particularly interested in paying me to do them. Remember also that my point of view is pretty limited -- my company builds and sells computer hardware and software, so the sorts of things I recommend below are highly biased in that direction. We don't build bridges or design wonder drugs or make rockets. The Interview. 1. If you were beginning graduate school in mathematics today, what courses would you take to be as valuable as possible in the job market a few years from now? It would probably depend on how smart I was, and what I wanted to do. Obviously, if I were one of the top 2 or 3 mathematicians in the country, I'd be virtually certain of getting an academic job whereever I wanted, so I could stick to pure mathematics if that's what I liked. For the rest of us, however, it seems clear that even if you want to be in academia, the future job market there is pretty uncertain, so it would be wise to take some more applied courses, or better yet, get some experience via summer jobs or something in industry. So outside of mathematics, the most useful courses I took or audited were in computer science and electrical engineering -- particularly those that required me to build something or make some software work. I actually did sit in on a lot of physics, chemistry, and biology courses as well because they interested me, and it's sometimes useful, when dealing with customers, to know something about what they're trying to do. In computer science, I'd recommend introductory courses in a few basic areas -- it's nice to know how a compiler works, how an operating system works, how to write solid, production code, and (at least at Silicon Graphics) something about graphics and image processing. In electrical engineering, it's nice to be able to read a digital circuit diagram, although there's certainly no need to know how to design one. Some simple knowledge of the hardware architecture or your computer can make a 10 times performance difference in your code. For math courses I recommend, see the next answer. 2. What are the mathematical tools that you use most? What are the things I should be getting familiar with? Is there a particular computer language or skill that is absolutely necessary in a new hire? I've worked in a lot of areas of computer science, and until I began working with graphics, I used very little mathematics other than basic principles of logic and deduction. It's a good idea to have some idea how to estimate the performance of an algorithm which can be tricky. In graphics, I use linear algebra heavily, projective geometry, and some differential geometry. Other people here who do a lot of image processing work know a bit about the various filtering techniques (Fourier transforms, finite Fourier transforms, wavelets, and so on). I'd guess that in the next few years, there will be a lot more work in image processing because it's finally getting cheap enough to do quite interesting things on relatively inexpensive machines. Some of the work here requires a bit of numerical analysis, and a lot of our customers use it heavily. We don't do any differential equations work here, but a lot of customers do, so it's good to have some expertise in that area in-house. These folks will deal with the customers and with the hardware designers and make sure we're building the right stuff. Actually, the folks here that do this are not mathematicians -- they're often physicists or mechanical engineers who have had huge amounts of practical experience with PDEs. 3. Suppose you are talking to a brilliant, new math Ph.D. with a "pure" background who really wants to get a job in industry in the next year or so. What minimal re-education path would you suggest? If you're a brilliant PhD, you presumably are smart enough to teach yourself. I'm not brilliant, and that's what I did. I bought books on the topics I mentioned above and bought a cheap computer, and was my own professor. I wrote a simple interpreter, compiler, and operating system basically from scratch, and it's amazing how much I learned. I bought chips and built some simple circuits, including flip-flops, adders, counters, et cetera, which also proved to be extremely valuable. The main problem with the above scheme is that it's hard to get a job without "official" certification -- none of this stuff appears on any of my transcripts -- so you should not count on starting in your ideal position. Get any computer job in a company that has jobs like the one you really want, and after a year or two, if you prove to be competent, you can move to any of those jobs. In industry, after a couple of years, nobody cares what your degree is or where you went to school -- all that matters is how well you've done there. My first non-mathematical job was in a marketing group, teaching customers to use a sort of complicated word-processor. I was able to get the job because I had some teaching experience as a graduate student and in a junior college. Once I was in the company for a while, it became obvious that I had some technical ability as well, and I never had any trouble getting a job after that. So my advice is that if you want to change careers, get whatever related job you can, and do a really good job. Also, read as much as you can about software engineering on the side -- there is a huge amount to learn, and it's not easy to "derive it from first principles". 4. How many Ph.D.'s from mathematics are in your employ? How many statisticians? Physicists? I think there are 4 math PhDs here. I'm a graphics hacker, another of us writes compilers, but the two others actually do some mathematics. One works on problems of surface description and algorithms, and the other works a lot with numerical accuracy concerns for various algorithms. I actually do a little mathematics, since a lot of people know I've got a PhD, it seems like once every couple of weeks or so somebody comes by with some problem that has a mathematical component and I "consult" on it. 5. How many hours per week does the average industrial mathematician work? Here, at least, we're all just "engineers". When there's no crisis, it can be a standard 40 hour/week job. In a crisis (of which there are plenty), it can be 50, 60, or 70 hours/week. I find that by being clever, I can anticipate a lot of crises and head them off, and I probably work 45-50 hours almost all the time. But when you're new on the job, and trying to impress the boss, it wouldn't hurt to put in some extra hours. 6. How is the work structured? Do they just hand you a project and say, "This is your baby; get it done in 10 weeks?" Or do you always work in a group? How big are these groups? Is there always a deadline, or do some groups work on a more open-ended timetable? Almost all work is done in groups, but the group is just handed a project and told, "Make a machine that can draw a million triangles per second, costs us less than $10000 in parts, and have it done in 18 months." This may not be typical of the industry, however. 7. How do you find the mathematicians you hire? Is there a bulletin board where openings are posted? We never look for mathematicians; in fact, we rarely look for any degrees. We have a job opening like "experienced compiler writer", or "entry-level operating systems programmer", and we look for that. Of course for jobs like those, it's more likely that the hiring managers would look at resumes of computer science graduates (at least among people with no work experience). If the applicant has work experience, that's what's examined first. 8. Suppose you are looking to hire an expert in P.D.E's and after taking a look at the market and realizing you have a hundred people to choose from, you start thinking about what other attributes you want this person to have. What's on that list? I'd make sure the person we hired had experience with solving them on big machines, and had a good idea of how to deal with unreliable hardware. For giant PDEs, we usually use networks of multi-processors, and stuff is breaking all the time during the calculations. The algorithms must be robust enough to survive this. Of course, I'm only familiar with the sorts of work we do, but it typically involves huge problems requiring super computers. 9. If you could form your own applied science department to train future employees, what would you put on the curriculum? Actually, for our needs, computer science and electrical engineering departments do a pretty good job at supplying 99% of our engineers. _____________________________________________________________ Item #5 Joke to the Editor A Physicist, a Biologist, and a Mathematician see two people enter a house, and then after some time, they see three people leave the house. The Physicist concludes, "My initial observation must have been incorrect." The Biologist concludes, "Clearly, the two reproduced..." The Mathematician concludes, "Well, if one more person enters the house, then there will be no-one in the house!" - Ken Stevens stevens@fields.uwaterloo.ca _______________________________________________________________ Item #6 Charles Yeomans cyeomans@ms.uky.edu Mark Winstead mwwinst@gcr.com Nancy Wilson nwilson@stmarys-ca.edu Emil Volcheck Emil.Volcheck@risc.uni-linz.ac.at Frank Sottile sottile@math.toronto.edu Vic Perera vicum@math.ohio-state.edu Franklin Mendivil mendivil@math.gatech.edu Kevin Madigan madigan@math.nwu.edu Leigh Lunsford lunsford@math.uah.edu Steve Kennedy skennedy@mathcs.carleton.edu Matt Hudelson hudelson@math.washington.edu Silvia Heubach silvi@cinenet.net Bob Dobrow dobrow@cam.nist.gov Lyle Cochran lcochran@fresno.edu Kevin Charlwood kec1@bradley.bradley.edu Neil Calkin calkin@math.gatech.edu Wendy Brunzie brunzie@math.montana.edu Curtis Bennett cbennet@bgnet.bgsu.edu Frank Arlinghaus frank@math.ysu.edu Edward Aboufadel aboufade@scus1.ctstateu.edu _______________________________________________________________ End of Journal -- Next week: The Discussion Continues