Distinguished Speaker Seminar by Dr. Charles Allen Butler

Solan, Feb 08
JUIT, Waknaghat – On February 06 (Monday) the SIAM JUIT chapter successfully
conducted the third seminar of its Distinguished Speaker Seminar Series, the front-running
events of the Student Chapter.
The seminar was attended by the Vice-Chancellor Prof. (Dr.) Rajendra Kumar Sharma, Dean (A&R) Prof. (Dr.) Ashok Kumar Gupta, Faculty Advisor Prof. (Dr.) Vivek Kumar Sehgal and other faculty members of the University.
The speaker for the seminar was Dr. Charles Allen Butler, Vice-President and Chair of the
Board of Directors of Daniel H. Wagner Associates. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics from
Texas Tech University and PhD in Mathematics from the University of Illinois. He has
served as the principal investigator for Department of Defense R&D projects involving a
variety of mathematical disciplines as applied to areas such as tracking, track correlation, data fusion, and search optimization.
In the beginning, he told the attendees about jobs and career opportunities in Mathematics.
He talked about the relation and differentiation between the working style in Industrial
settings and in Academic research and teaching. He referred to industrial career as a
mathematician as a “BIG Career” compared to Academic career options. He then described a day in the life of a “BIG mathematician”. He talked about how to prepare for a “BIG career”
as a mathematician and as a computer scientist. He also talked about the internship in the
Network of National Laboratories. He also gave a brief guide about how to prepare for an
Industrial internship in mathematics and computing; and about the interview process for the same. He emphasized that a mathematician should also have a basic idea about coding in order to help in developing better algorithms.
The seminar concluded with a Q&A session with the attendees, where both the faculty and
the students asked their queries and discussed a few interesting applications of the discipline.