Mary Hesselgrave

Summary

When I was in high school, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life—it's just that I was wrong. One of the delightful aspects of a career in mathematics is the opportunity to make choices. I wandered into computer science as part of an effort to be better prepared to teach mathematics for use in today's environment, and I found that computer science is a fertile source of interesting problems. The boundary between theoretical computer science and mathematics is fuzzy, and my dissertation in axiomatic semantics was closely related to formal logic.

I joined AT&T Bell Laboratories after earning my PhD. I have enjoyed working on such different kinds of problems as the development of a semantic interpreter for telephone service orders, performance measurement for an experimental database machine, compiler test automation, performance improvements for database system software, development of a distributed transaction processing facility, operations system capacity planning, systems architecture, and process engineering. The skills involved in my work include digesting large amounts of information to understand the essential requirements for a project. It frequently takes me six months to understand a problem that is initially described in one sentence.

In the course of my job I often work with colleagues to obtain a deeper understanding of the issues involved in our projects.