So, when you're a mathematician and at a party with lots of people who "always hated math", and you're asked "What do you do?", what do you say? No matter what, the response is usually something like "yes, but what do you do?", or silence. Don't go into math for fortune or to be popular with the opposite sex.
More seriously though, this blog is my attempt to talk myself through what exactly it is I do. I've been doing this for 20 years, not counting grad school, and I start to see patterns (that one doesn't work either "I look for patterns in things" gets strange looks).
Some parts of Math have changed greatly in the last 30 years. Nobody but the very purest writes papers on paper anymore. There used to be a whole profession of mathematical typists (no, they didn't "do math"), and IBM played a big role in that by making typewriters that had special symbols. Now most papers are written in LaTex., and instead of waiting weeks for it to be typed, publication quality math appears almost immediately.
There are other things that have changed. For example, differential equations that can't be solved in closed form can be solved on the computer. Is that math? To answer that question you need to know what math is. Hence this blog.
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These postings are the opinions of the author and don’t necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of IBM.