Re Move Over, Coders - Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Krulwich <krulwich () yahoo com>
> Date: January 16, 2017 at 4:09:25 PM EST
> To: "dave () farber net" <dave () farber net>, ip <ip () listbox com>
> Subject: Re: [IP] Move Over, Coders - Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley
> Reply-To: Krulwich <krulwich () yahoo com>
>
> I'm reminded of the fact that back in my undergrad days, CMU, despite having a top CS department turning out PhD's, 
> refused (at the time) to give a CS undergrad degree, thinking that it was important for undergrads to get an applied 
> math degree, that a pure CS undergrad degree wouldn't be enough grounding. A few years after I moved on to grad 
> school they of course introduced the BS in CS degree.
>
> If today's hard problems in CS require physicists, might CMU have been right at the time?
>
> --Bruce
>
> From: Dave Farber <farber () gmail com>
> To: ip <ip () listbox com> 
> Sent: Monday, January 16, 2017 9:05 PM
> Subject: [IP] Move Over, Coders - Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley
>
> Coders and graduate computer scientists a different beast djf
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> > From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> > Date: January 16, 2017 at 12:50:53 PM EST
> > To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> > Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Move Over, Coders - Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley
> > Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
> >
> > Move Over, Coders—Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley
> > By Cade Metz
> > Jan 16 2017
> > <https://www.wired.com/2017/01/move-coders-physicists-will-soon-rule-silicon-valley/>
> >
> > It’s a bad time to be a physicist.
> >
> > At least, that’s what Oscar Boykin says. He majored in physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and in 2002 he 
> > finished a physics PhD at UCLA. But four years ago, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland 
> > discovered the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle first predicted in the 1960s. As Boykin points out, everyone 
> > expected it. The Higgs didn’t mess with the theoretical models of the universe. It didn’t change anything or give 
> > physcists anything new to strive for. “Physicists are excited when there’s something wrong with physics, and we’re 
> > in a situation now where there’s not a lot that’s wrong,” he says. “It’s a disheartening place for a physicist to be 
> > in.” Plus, the pay isn’t too good.
> >
> > Boykin is no longer a physicist. He’s a Silicon Valley software engineer. And it’s a very good time to be one of 
> > those.
> >
> > Boykin works at Stripe, a $9-billion startup that helps businesses accept payments online. He helps build and 
> > operate software systems that collect data from across the company’s services, and he works to predict the future of 
> > these services, including when, where, and how the fraudulent transactions will come. As a physicist, he’s ideally 
> > suited to the job, which requires both extreme math and abstract thought. And yet, unlike a physicist, he’s working 
> > in a field that now offers endless challenges and possibilities. Plus, the pay is great.
> >
> > If physics and software engineering were subatomic particles, Silicon Valley has turned into the place where the 
> > fields collide. Boykin works with three other physicists at Stripe. In December, when General Electric acquired the 
> > machine learning startup Wise.io, CEO Jeff Immelt boasted that he had just grabbed a company packed with physicists, 
> > most notably UC Berkeley astrophysicist Joshua Bloom. The open source machine learning software H20, used by 70,000 
> > data scientists across the globe, was built by Swiss physicist Arno Candel, who once worked at the SLAC National 
> > Accelerator Laboratory. Vijay Narayanan, Microsoft’s head of data science, is an astrophysicist, and several other 
> > physicists work under him.
> >
> > It’s not on purpose, exactly. “We didn’t go into the physics kindergarten and steal a basket of children,” says 
> > Stripe president and co-founder John Collison. “It just happened.” And it’s happening across Silicon Valley. Because 
> > structurally and technologically, the things that just about every internet company needs to do are more and more 
> > suited to the skill set of a physicist.
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>
>
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