Matthew Probert
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What he does:
- Matt is in charge of designing/developing all customer facing code for their services, and working with company business development people to clearly define needs.
Math on the job:
- Some of the code Matt works on requires retrieving XML files from across the net that are over 6GB large, parsing, processing and storing them. With this much information, efficient algorithms that meet the resources at hand are important. Computing memory/disk/db requirements based on expected size and expected growth in size, come into play. Running simulations to determine some of these factors, and things like processing time required, are important. All of this also tends to lead into special thought on the database structure, so that queries to search/retrieve data later are as speedy as possible.
Matthew's background:
- Matt received a Bachelor of Science in ACMS in March, 2007, with an emphasis in discrete math and algorithms.
- Matt loves engineering. He got into amateur radio and electronics at a young age. Computers, software and embedded systems were a natural threesome to him. He realized that having a good background in algorithm and data structure design/implementation was very valuable in many fields. Also, being able to understand ways to analyze the performance of an algorithm (or set of) was another benefit of a mathematics orientated background.
Advice for students:
- Go deep! Don't just learn/memorize enough to pass the test or do your homework. You will find that you really don't understand the material and it will be useless to you in the future when you need it. You will not give your future employer the feeling that you are really intelligent because you didn't REALLY learn anything. You will know enough on the surface to get by and get your job done, but you won't get ahead unless you are lucky. Be passionate about learning the material on a really deep level in EVERY class, whether you like it or not. This is the key to success.