Engineering as a Social Activity

I haven't been able to blog the past week because I have been in Los Angeles at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC). I always enjoy going to this conference. After thinking about it, I enjoy it because of the people. The optics business is really a relatively small community of people that I have come to know and appreciate over the past 11 years. One nice aspect of this community is that it is composed of very smart people, which helps to keep me at the top of my game. I constantly marvel at the cleverness of the work being done in fiber optics. I also like being a part of a community that is making a real difference in the quality of people's lives. The information revolution has been driven to a large extent by the ability of people to move data rapidly around the world, which mean fiber optics. My association with this community has allowed me to meet people from around the world and to travel to places that I would probably never have seen otherwise. As always happens, a number of mathematical items popped up during the show. I will be writing about these items during the following weeks.