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Tom Stevens smiled, and fidgeted with the keys to the missile launchers. As a Lieutenant Commander and Tactical Action Officer of USS HUÉ CITY on station in the Adriatic, the keys, the missiles, and every weapons system on the ship was his responsibility. Knowing how best to employ them also fell under his job description, so he wanted to understand his new orders thoroughly. These new deployment tactics were pretty strange, but one had to respect the folks who came up with them. He'd never seen ship dispersal plans like this before. At first glance, it seemed like there was a pattern, but the longer he stared at them, the clearer it became that he had no idea what the pattern might be. He knew the Navy worked with mathematicians to develop codes and new technology. The idea that, after thousands of years of people making war, there might be something new under the strategic sun was surprising. He had figured that the implementation of computers would make C3I (command, control, communication, and intelligence) easier, thus leading to more "orderly" tactical formations. What would make these quasi-random patterns the basis of a good battle strategy?
Petty Officer Waterford swore under his breath as he saw the mess. The plotting table wasn't ready for the training scheduled for 0300, and that left him only a few minutes to make it ready. He started preparing the Time-Frequency plot first. It was amazing, he thought, that just measuring the changes in frequency of sound emitted by targets could yield range, course, and speed information on each. He'd heard of the Doppler effect, but didn't really understand it. Arithmetic was about his speed, and he didn't use that much, either. The TF plot complete, he started preparing the geographic plot, an Earth-fixed plot of the ship and all sonar or radar contacts. Waterford liked this part, because the passive tracking of sonar contacts used lots of geometry, something at which he excelled. Sound is pretty simple, he thought, so he figured that a lot of math must be needed to figure out how to do all of these mysterious calculations. He wondered how do they coax so much information from such a simple signal?
Boredom had made it a grueling midwatch for Midshipman First Class Evans. His watch complete, he strolled to the fantail to take in the sunrise. Engineering duty could be dull while transiting, but sitting in one spot off the coast of the former Republic of Yugoslavia could be maddeningly so. As always, he had taken advantage of the slow watch to study the engineering systems. His mechanical engineering classes back at Annapolis found fertile applicative soil here, shedding light on the countless systems. He stood on the fantail taking in the rising sun, and wondered about a question he'd posed to the Engineering Officer of the Watch. The old Chief had been at a loss to explain why it was easy to balance two generators on the power grid, but almost impossible to balance three. Though stumped, the Chief had pointed out that there seemed to be a lot of systems with three "parts" that normally ran only two because it was hard to balance three, although many systems with four parts were easy to balance. Maybe, Evans thought, it wasn't an engineering deficiency, but something inherently unstable about systems with three foci. As an engineering student he had taken plenty of math courses, and he liked the material, but sometimes with the tougher material it was hard to understand the Kaczynski-esque professors. Is there a better way to explain math the people who use it everyday?
Steve sits down to fill out the thousands of pages of graduate school applications. Most of it is fairly straightforward - schools, grades, blood type, amount of wood one might chuck if one were a woodchuck, etc. - until he gets to the dreaded "Statement of Purpose."
"Include your current goals." I'm applying to graduate school, what do they think my current goal is, learning to belly dance? I wrote down some goals for that psych class…where did that list go? In the short term I'm learning Linux and C. In the long term, I guess the only non-obvious goal is that I want to contribute significantly to improve the state of higher education, like my grandfather has.
"Career plans." Career? That's an anachronism. (c.f. Job Shift, by William Bridges) I plan to do research and teach, but I have broad research and teaching interests, so who knows where I'll end up?
"Reasons for selecting a major field of study." On a single page, the applications say, I'm supposed to explain twenty nine years of seeing the world through a lens described at once as analytical and aesthetic, static and stochastic, of discipline and dementia. What should I write? I could write that I'm an experienced database programmer, reveling in the balance between orthonormal form (essential to scalability) and simplicity (vital for performance). I could go into detail about my research project, "Computing Integrals with respect to the Invariant Measures of Certain Fractals," presented and recognized as "outstanding" at MathFest 96. I could emphasize my commitment and maturity by writing about my decorated naval service, or my wife, of whom I'm so proud for her new Ph.D. in psychology. I could explain that a little Navy went a long way in fixing my lack of focus at Ohio State, thus highlighting my perfect grades at Louisiana State. Maybe I should take a philosophical tack, writing truthfully that my love of discovering new things combined with my love of explaining those things to others made a career in research and teaching clear to me many years ago. Hmmm…perhaps instead of describing my perspective, I should just stick to the basics.
After a moment, he begins. "I'd like to see if I can't answer a few questions…."
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