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It's the first day back to school after a holiday weekend and mathematics professor Janet Myhre has the flu. A positive attitude, yogurt in the cooler, and tissues on her desk upstairs in Adams Hall offer a practical defense.
Not that anyone enjoys being sick, but Myhre can't afford downtime. This is a woman who travels in U.S. Navy submarines on inspections, has ridden shotgun with a Navy pilot executing a pinpoint landing on an aircraft carrier ("it looked like this dot in the ocean"), and has clearance to enter missile installations. And on this particular morning—flu or no flu—there are classes to teach and committee meetings to attend. Moreover, there are preparations to be made for the 25th anniversary of the Ruth K. and Joseph C. Reed Institute for Decision Science. As Reed Institute director, Myhre's running the show, which—at the very least—means wrangling alumni in finance, consulting, new technology, and executive management as symposium panelists.
Held Feb. 3, the institute's 25th-anniversary symposium included 18 former students including Scott Turicchi '85, Ian Prager '99, Daniel Giesberg '76, and Elizabeth Murphy Dean '88. They discussed their work with organizations such as Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Deloitte & Touche, and Lockheed Martin. Discussions were geared to finance, improving business performance, and risk and reward in executive management.
Looking back, the Reed Institute—formerly called the Institute for Decision Science—has compiled an impressive record of projects since its founding in 1975. Its objective is to teach students how to apply mathematical techniques to solve problems facing private firms and government agencies. To do that, Myhre has used her private consulting business as a funnel to reroute clients such as the Environmental Protection Agency, Hughes Aircraft and the U.S. Navy to the College. The work gives math and economics students valuable, practical training in mathematical models.
Explaining what Myhre and her students do in layman's terms is "part of the challenge," she says. But loosely, students derive equations and create models for the design of software into which clients plug their data. Myhre and students currently are working with Miller's Outpost to find out whether the clothing retailer is getting the biggest bang for its advertising buck. "We're trying to determine whether their radio spots and television spots are cost-effective," Myhre says.
Myhre also has earned the institute interesting work for the U.S. Department of Defense. Reed Institute students made a significant contribution to the U.S. armed forces in the 1991 Gulf War. Myhre walks over to her dry-erase board and draws a series of elipses surrounding a dot—an abstraction of a mathematical model used to locate Iraqi bunkers and command posts. Soldiers manning the system fed the data into software that progressively narrowed the uncertainty of the target location. "I don't like war," says Myhre, "but we had a lot of troops over there, and if this math protects American lives..."
Asked about public fears of missiles inadvertently
exploding—such as with the Y2K scare—Myhre is reassuring.
She faults the media for sensationalizing very unlikely events,
especially possible nuclear accidents. "Anything nuclear—anything!—we
are so careful about," she says of the armed forces. Even with Myhre's
military clearances, "If I go near [a nuclear device] when I'm not
supposed to, there are armed guards—above and below, with automatics
pointing at me!"
What does the future hold for the fields of decision science and data analysis? "The applied math of the 20th century was more involved in the physical sciences," she says. "But we're now going to see mathematics answering questions in the social sciences, which have become vastly more sophisticated and quantified. And it's going to be more important for students to understand the graphs that are being published in newspapers—how not to lie with statistics or data manipulation."
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Myhre rerouted clients from her private consulting business to the institute, giving students hands-on experience solving real-world problems.
(Photo by Jeremy Green)
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