After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1994, he had two one year appointments at University of California, Riverside . After sending out 180 applications to schools and seeing little prospect of obtaining a permanent position, he decided to look seriously at industry. I had worked at Hughes for two summers as an undergraduate. Since the work of my lab involves extracting information out of the environment, mathematics plays a fundamental role. Here one can think of signal processing as a primary example.
Mathematics shows up in a variety of other ways as well.
One problem I looked into involved inertial navigation. This is using an aircraft's previous position, and knowledge of its motion, to compute its new position. Another problem I investigated arose because a discontinuity in a function was not handled properly. Mike finds that many of the problem solving skills he acquired in his academic career are essential to his industrial work. Mathematics at various levels of sophistication is fairly pervasive at the Lab.