Solving Equations is Not Solving Problems

In 1955 I was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago completing a dissertation in Topology under Shiing-Shen Chern. Although I had been trained exclusively in pure mathematics, jobs in industry were beginning to become available to mathematicians and I was interested. Some of my teachers expressed disapproval of such notions, but Professor Chern did not. He told me he believed that working on physical problems was interesting and difficult, and he encouraged me to keep an open mind. I found that I was curious to learn more about the applications of the mathematics I had studied, so upon graduation I took an industrial rather than a teaching position.