BIG SIGMAA People.  Find out about your BIG SIGMAA colleagues.

Antonio Cabal

Ph.D.  The University of Western Ontario, Ontario, Canada

M.Sc.  Simon Fraser University, B.C., Canada

B.Sc.  Moscow State University – Lomonosov, Moscow, Russia
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My attraction to mathematics is captured in Arthur Cayley’s quote:

 “As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.”

I had the misfortune to have very bad math teachers throughout my entire pre-college education but the attraction was already too strong to be broken. Thus, right after high school I got a scholarship in the Department of Mechanics & Mathematics at Moscow State University, and I have been involved with applied mathematics ever since.

After I finished my B.Sc. I spent three years developing and implementing mathematical models to compute deep and shallow water sea circulation around Cuba at the Institute of  Oceanology of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba.

In the summer of 1998, while I was finishing my Ph.D. at The University of Western Ontario, I went to my Alma Mater (Simon Fraser University) to participate in a Graduate Industrial Mathematics Modeling Camp. It was my first encounter with industrial mathematicians. There I met my current mentor at the Research & Development Labs of the Eastman Kodak Co., Dr. David S. Ross. By the fall of the same year I was doing a postdoc at the Integrated Materials & Microstructures Laboratory, Eastman Kodak’s research labs. A year later it became a permanent position.

In the two years I have been at Kodak I have worked on several fascinating projects ranging from the acoustic effect of air bubbles within fluid micro-cavities of different shapes to uncovering a thermo-mechanical mystery of  a clamped bimetalic micro-beam’s frequency response to a thermal pulse. My workdays are very atypical. They could be consumed just working for several hours on a simple problem someone in the lab has or it could be a several months (even years) project that has many different complicated aspects and a lot of interaction with other scientists in the lab. In the process of solving a single one of these problems many aspects of mathematics could be involved. We may need to find roots of algebraic equations, solve systems of ODE’s, solve systems of PDE’s using commercial packages (ANSYS, FLOW-3D), or writing our own code. We may have to find eigenvalues or solve a given integral. In short, I use some aspect of mathematics every day at work.

The interaction with other members of the lab and the feedback I have gotten from experimentalists and engineers have been very valuable and a lot of fun. Because of them I have come to truly appreciate Manfred Eigen quote:

A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.

In industry you have to keep the applicability and relevance of your work constantly present in your mind.