What Comes Next

A few weeks ago at the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT, Ann Winblad made the comment, “Finally, math is cool again.” The comment stayed with me, as math has been an important part of virtually everything I’ve worked on - from InfoSec Labs in the 90’s, translating mainframe-era security models into methodologies appropriate for companies taking their first steps online, to TurnTide a few years ago, restricting use of resources by spammers to break the economic model behind their theft and abuse.

There does seem to be a general upswing in the visibility of math in the commercial world, starting with the extension of the quant revolution in the finance markets to the optimization of a diverse set of industries. The rise in the popularity of poker, and the influx of new players, has led to some new popular interest in math as well - books like The Mathematics of Poker (which I recommend) were hard to imagine on bookstore shelves a few years ago, but have been remarkably successful.

In the world of technology-driven startups, which was the context for Ann’s comment, I draw an imaginary line between two applications of math:

• Creation of a fundamentally new product, business or market
• Optimization of an existing business

The latter of these applications is the one that is driving the quant revolution in finance, poker, and a thousand other areas. In the online world, some big ideas have already broken ground and fundamentally changed the way a number of markets work. The mechanics of business online and the rush to market, however, mean that a lot of the decades of quant optimization in the offline world has been left behind.

I’m pretty excited about the opportunities that come from taking inefficiencies out of businesses that operate at Internet scale, as well as recapturing some of the subtleties of the offline markets. Math is cool again, and some very cool new answers are being created to the age-old question asked of math teachers - “But when will I ever use this?”