
Applying (Math) Theory at Microsoft - dskhatri
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20312/
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tptacek
No amount of math is going to make multicast happen.

Mathematicians always say that their work has applications in network
optimization, but it seems to me that the math itself is largely
inspirational; Jain's CUTE scheme (precursor of TCP/IP congestion control, the
most important distributed algorithm on the Internet) had fluid dynamics
inspiration, but trivial implementation.

I don't like the connotation that mathematics is a prerequisite to study and
improve distributed systems. I can name more far-reaching advances, even in
routing, from non-mathematicians.

