She's Got Their Number

Dietrich, whose husband is an IBM software architect, joined the company in 1984 after earning her PhD in operations research and industrial engineering at Cornell, and she applied that "gorgeous theory" to designing more-efficient chip-manufacturing lines. It was thrilling to see how useful math could be. In the mid-1990s, she grew bored between projects--"a dangerous situation," she laughs--and pursued a new set of problems, spending six months in the field alongside IBM consultants and customers. "They couldn't tell you the dependent and independent variables," she says. But she could, and that ability to translate the practical into the theoretical (and back) was powerful. In some ways, her experience was the basis for how her research department now operates.

If you're not a mathematician, the deep math that Dietrich and her team perform sounds utterly foreign--combinatorial auctions, integer programming, conditional logic, and so on. Their whiteboard scribbles at Watson look incomprehensible, like Farsi or Greek (then again, many of the symbols are Greek). But these mysterious equations represent the real world and how it works. When mathematicians "model" a problem, they're creating a numerical snapshot of a dynamic system and its variables.

Take the forest-fire project Dietrich and the researchers are working on. Extinguishing fast-spreading flames over tens of thousands of acres is an expensive and complicated undertaking. In 2000, a particularly devastating year, the federal government spent more than $1 billion and still lost more then 8 million acres. Its fire planners want to reduce the cost and the damage through better coordination among the five agencies involved.

Armed with seven years of data, IBM's mathematicians are creating an enormous model that shows how the resources--every firefighter, truck, plane, etc.--have been used in the past, how much each effort cost, and how many acres burned. The algorithms describe the likely costs and results for any number of strategies to combat a given fire. "How many bulldozers and buckets do you keep in Yellowstone Park?" Dietrich asks. "And if you need to move them elsewhere, how much will it cost and how long will it take?" She's talking fast, describing the unruly variables that math makes sense of. "It's a nice project. Complicated, huh?"

Uh, yeah. For years, mathematicians were so focused on basic research that they wouldn't go near projects like this--and they weren't asked to, either. "It was like working at a university without even the load of teaching," says longtime researcher Baruch Schieber. "When you decided what to work on, the first consideration wasn't, how will this impact the company?" If researchers wanted to, they could close their office door and focus on the most esoteric research, uninterrupted--and isolated.

At first, Horn says, putting math specialists in front of clients made everyone nervous, not least of all the clients. The researchers are undeniably brilliant, he says, chuckling, but "you wonder how some of them get home at night." Watson, located an hour north of New York, has a laid-back, collegiate feel; sneakers and jeans, along with the occasional bushy beard and ponytail, are the norm. Opinionated, professorial types fit right in. Dietrich may seem genial and charmingly quirky, but when she holds forth on the intricacies of math, she can be intimidating. She doesn't suffer fools and relishes a good debate.

But Dietrich has learned to soften her approach to avoid undermining the consultants' relationships with clients. She helped create a class for researchers that explains the consulting process and culture. A mathematician's perfectionism has to give way to deadlines. The smartest-person-in-the-room vibe is considered off-putting, rather than an invitation to match wits. "Instead of forcing an argument on logic, which we're trained to do--it's a bit adversarial--you have to keep your mouth shut and listen," she says. "And you've got to stay out of the technical muck."

Some longtime mathematicians initially worried that research would suffer under Dietrich. Instead, they lead a double life. In fact, says researcher Robin Lougee- Heimer, projects like the one she is working on now, a nationwide distribution puzzle for a brand-name customer, uncover fertile research topics. "I'm getting exposed to great problems," she says, "with nasty details and complexity."

It used to be that Schieber, a senior manager in optimization, would hear about a project within IBM and occasionally reach out to consultants. They rarely returned his calls. Now, he says, "I am the one being selective."

"When we first started asking what resources consultants use on projects, they said every project was different. That just drove me crazy."