Alumni Newsletter: Spring '99

Jean Parks joins faculty

For as long as we can remember, the U of R's math professors have all been pure mathematicians, though a few have made significant contributions to applied math. Recently, Jean Parks joined our faculty. Her passion is to apply mathematical thinking to the problems of the real world.

She received the Master's degree at Stanford in the late 50's, and worked in applied math at Lockheed Missiles and elsewhere. She took a break to raise 4 children, and returned to graduate school here, working part time to earn a Ph.D degree in 1978.

She then took a position at Xerox in Rochester For three years she worked in applied probability (a subject unrelated to her thesis,) then moved to a series of managerial positions. About nine years ago, the company was concerned that it was taking too long to turn good ideas into viable products. She determined that a major part of the problem was that engineers were not able to deal with variability. All components of and inputs to a system vary somewhat from the norm, and this is the primary cause of failures. A system designed to be fail safe ends up being "overdesigned," so that it is much more costly than it needs to be.

Jean decided to return to mathematical work (a rare step in industry!) to address this problem. Her solution was to take a probabilistic approach: each component and input has a probabilty distribution, resulting in a probability distribution for the output. She went beyond the prevalent Monte Carlo approach, where probabilities are simulated by computer, and developed ways of approximating the actual distributions so that a whole system could be analyzed effectively; in addition she developed stochastic optimization techniques to optimize the system, resulting in a theory she calls Holistic Probabilistic Design. She has also produced software to implement this approach.

She recently retired from Xerox, and took a position at the U of R in order to spread her ideas and to try to modify the way mathematics is taught to those who will eventually be in a position to apply it. She is currently teaching a course in these methods to a mixed audience.