TITLE: The Infinite Horizon
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: January 18, 2015 10:26 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
In
<A HREF="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/2013/06/11/mathematics-live-demarco-wilkinson/">
   Mathematics, Live: A Conversation with Laura DeMarco and Amie Wilkinson</A>,
Amie Wilkinson recounts the pivotal moment when she knew she wanted
to be a mathematician.  Insecure about her abilities in mathematics,
unsure about what she wanted to do for a career, and with no
encouragement, she hadn't applied to grad school.  So:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 I came back home to Chicago, and I got a job as an actuary.  I
 enjoyed my work, but I started to feel like there was a hole in my
 existence.  There was something missing.  I realized that suddenly
 my universe had become finite.  Anything I had to learn for this
 job, I could learn eventually.  I could easily see the limits of
 this job, and I realized that with math there were so many things
 I could imagine that I would never know.  That's why I wanted to
 go back and do math.  I love that feeling of this infinite horizon.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

After having written software for an insurance company during the
summers before and after my senior year in college, I knew all
too well the "hole in my existence" that Wilkinson talks about,
the shrinking universe of many industry jobs.  I was deeply
interested in the ideas I had found in <EM>G&ouml;del, Escher,
Bach</EM>, and in the idea of creating an intelligent machine.
There seemed no room for those ideas in the corporate world I
saw.

I'm not sure when the thought of graduate school first occurred
to me, though.  My family was blue collar, and I didn't have much
exposure to academia until I got to Ball State University.  Most
of my friends went out to get jobs, just like Wilkinson.  I recall
applying for a few jobs myself, but I never took the job search all
that seriously.

At least some of the credit belongs to one of my CS professors, Dr.
William Brown.  Dr. Brown was an old IBM guy who seemed to know so
much about how to make computers do things, from the lowest-level
details of IBM System/360 assembly language and JCL up to the
software engineering principles needed to write systems software.
When I asked him about graduate school, he talked to me about how
to select a school and a Ph.D. advisor.  He also talked about the
strengths and weaknesses of my preparation, and let me know that
even though I had some work to do, I would be able to succeed.

These days, I am lucky even to have such conversations with my
students.

For Wilkinson, DeMarco and me, academia was a natural next step in
our pursuit of the infinite horizon.  But I now know that we are
fortunate to work in disciplines where a lot of the interesting
questions are being asked and answers by people working in "the
industry".  I watch with admiration as many of my colleagues do
amazing things while working for companies large and small.
Computer science offers so many opportunities to explore the
unknown.

Reading Wilkinson's recollection brought a flood of memories to
mind.  I'm sure I wasn't alone in smiling at her nod to finite
worlds and infinite horizons.  We have a lot to be thankful for.
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