Applied Mathematics in the Computer and Communications Industry

In the early ‘70’s, when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, I had the impression that mathematical problems of interest to industry were simply not of interest to mathematicians. I had read Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology and believed that pure mathematics ought not to be tainted by applications. But as my career progressed I found that I wanted to work on problems that bear more closely to science and engineering — partly in the hope that such work would be useful to people, but also that the connections would make the mathematics richer, more fun and more interesting. This was one of the reasons that I moved from a senior university position to IBM.