I.B.M. is the world’s largest employer of Ph.D.’s. It has plenty of businesses it can throw them at, but the trick is figuring out which ones will yield the best return. That happens by finding the algorithms for one industry, like power generation, that will work in another, like traffic management.
I.B.M., Mr. Mills [I.B.M.’s senior vice president for software and systems] said, is now the largest employer of Ph.D. mathematicians in the world, bringing their talents to things like oil exploration and medicine. “On the side we’re doing astrophysics, genomics, proteomics,” he said.
Generalizability appears to be the key to making money for I.B.M.
The trend of looking for commonalities and overlapping interests is emerging in many parts of both academia and business. At the ultrasmall nanoscale examination of a cell, researchers say, the disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics begin to collapse in on each other. In a broader search for patterns, students of the statistical computing language known as R have used methods of counting algae blooms to prove patterns of genocide against native peoples in Central America. Online marketers look at your behavior in a number of contexts to sell you something you may not even know you wanted.
