A Career in Applied Mathematics: Reminiscences
by
Alex McNabb
CMIS, CSIRO, Canberra, ACT.

How did a card playing night owl ever get into applied mathematics? A time like this serves to remind one of former mentors, colleagues and past institutions involved in carrying one down this odd but interesting path. It surely also has to be a time for looking back and endeavouring to put into some perspective past successes and failures, journeys to foreign shores, and encounters with soul mates of all ages and in many branches of science. Perhaps it is also a time to look for connecting threads and evolving directions in all this, in the hope that there is some great message to be liberated and delivered for further exploitation. Applied mathematics seems to be about finding answers to problems. These aren't written down in some great book and in reality the hardest task for an applied mathematician is finding good questions. There seem to be three types of problem out there in the real world; the trivial, the impossible, and the just solvable, and the boundaries between them are very blurred. They vary from person to person as well and some of ones strongest memories are of problems that suddenly jump from one category to another and usually with help from colleagues.

Date received: September 12, 1999

Copyright © 1999 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # cadl-22.