Organizing Mathematics

I'll kiss him on both cheeks - or all four if you'd prefer it.

— Winston Churchill about Charles de Gaulle

Figure 1: Barney Oliver, Superb Engineer Who Wrote HP's Notebook Guidelines (Source).

I am not a very organized person -- if you could see my desk you would agree. However, I never lose any technical work I have done. As an employee of an electronics manufacturing company, we have a wonderful documentation control system that is maintained by well-trained individuals. I use this system to save me from my disorganization.

Most companies have some sort of notebook-based system. For example, Honeywell used to require a notebook entry for every 8 hours period of work. HP had an excellent system that was setup by a master engineer (Figure 1).

Years ago, I decided that I would release everything I do into our engineering documentation system, which is called Agile. This practice has paid excellent dividends. I even have people ask me about how they can replicate my system.

The process is simple.

• I have a standardized way of documenting all my work.

  I have a template for everything, including mathematics. All of my standard tools (Mathcad, Word, Excel, etc) support templates.

• I create a document for each piece of work and assign that work a part number.

  Some people find this inconvenient, but I don't. Part numbers are cheap. Losing work is not.

• I think really hard about how to name the document.

  I treat the title like a collection of keywords that represent the set of likely words I would put into a search tool.

• I release the document on my approval only.

  I really believe that all engineers should be able to release documents solely on their signature. This encourages people to release information.

With this system, an unorganized person like me can take advantage of the excellent document control infrastructure that a manufacturing company must maintain anyway. The people who run our documentation system are the most organized people that I know. So our documentation system allows me to take advantage of the special skills of these folks. All of my analysis work goes into this data system. It imposes very little overhead on my work.

This post was motivated by a recent situation where I we needed to model the thermal characteristics of a metal enclosure. Back in 2002, I went through this same exercise for an enclosure of a different size and I released it at that time. Recently, we built a new enclosure that was similar in shape, but different in size. I did not even recall having done the analysis. But I went into our system, searched for "thermal model metal enclosure" and up popped the reference to my early work. I literally pulled up the old Mathcad spreadsheet, changed the enclosure dimensions, and had an updated analysis completed and ready for release within 10 minutes.

When I started as an engineer 33 years ago, the situation would have been different. HP, like most companies, used bound, paper notebooks for holding engineer's notes. HP had a good notebook system. In fact, their rules for maintaining the notebooks were so good that you can find them on the web today – these rules were written by Barney Oliver, who was a real character. But notebooks are not searchable. If an employee leaves, no one remembers what is in another engineer's notebooks. In the case of the document mentioned above, I did not even remember doing the analysis. With a notebook-based system, I would have ended up repeating all of that work. I shudder to think about it.

I even use a similar system at home for storing physical things like insurance policies, warranties, family documents, and manuals. I wrote an Access database that allows me to assign this stuff a part number and keywords. I then store the stuff in numerical order in a cabinet. I regularly go into that database and look stuff up by keyword. The database then gives me a number and I can go look the information up.