HN user
To be fair, I recall students who were legitimately terrorized by differential equations.
The woman was undoubtedly unnerved by the terse response to her attempt to be sociable, having never encountered someone in the midst of mathing hard. Or perhaps she just feared the equation had a singular solution.
on Shannon Laboratory (from https://around.com/where-are-they-now-bell-labs/):
[quote]AT&T was always oblivious to Shannon’s role as the father of modern communications, and (with its usual tin ear), couldn’t figure out how to benefit from its own history.
Back when Lucent split from AT&T and was granted most of Bell Labs (along with bragging rights for the invention of the transistor), I was busy trying to convince AT&T that a services company required an R&D capability. The original divestiture plan did not anticipate a basic research component—only a development lab. Long story, but eventually we managed to slide over around 10% of the scientists into the new AT&T Labs.
However, we couldn’t slide over its long history, mostly rooted in the physical sciences. We had the people, but lacked a well defined “brand.” By odd coincidence, I proposed if Bell Labs was granted computing in the divorce, we should own communications—and claim Shannon as our direct forebear.
AT&T HQ was ambivalent—they were unaware of Shannon’s seminal discoveries, and couldn’t imagine how claiming paternity of the communications revolution could benefit a long distance phone company. But we were given permission to name a lab building after Shannon. Fortunately, one of the lab’s directors (Ron Graham) was a mathematician and juggler and knew Shannon’s widow, and received permission.
But they still barely leverage this connection. Momentum is sometimes more powerful than entropy.[/quote]