Bruce A. Powell

Summary

The wizard says, “So you want to be a mathematician? Do you know what a mathematician does all day? He works with numbers, computers, and stuff like that.” When I was making that difficult decision as to what profession to pursue, that is about all I knew. But that didn't scare me. I liked numbers, computers, and all of the other stuff. Little did I know that I would have such a rewarding career.

The decision of “what I wanted to be when I grew up” was not easy. Having attended a liberal arts college, I was exposed to a number of fields. Believe it or not, during my senior year, I was undecided between architecture, dentistry, the ministry, and good old mathematics. Eventually, mathematics won the battle for my soul.

I began graduate school in pure mathematics, but soon became enamored with the applied side of mathematics that operations research offered. I learned queuing theory in a project with a railroad where we selected the number and location of “pools” of freight cars. I learned about probabilistic modeling applied to inventory theory. I learned about reliability applied to the maintenance of a fleet of repair trucks. I learned about the need for efficient computing applied to sorting a set of numbers. (Back then, computers were slow!)

I spent 20 years at the Westinghouse Research Laboratories working on operations research projects for the operating divisions of the company.