Drawing his inspiration from math

As Tom McCabe sees it, a mathematician is a person who can lay the framework and advance it; one who can see underlying principles and extend them; one who finds original insights.

Mathematics enables a person to succeed in a career and in creative pursuits, he believes, because math students are trained to develop a body of knowledge, systematize it, and find the limits of its domain.

But he worries that few students of math realize their potential worth.

“They are humbled by education – they don’t realize what they can do.”

He recently came back to campus to encourage Math Club members to follow their dreams. He told the students that their rigorous background has equipped them well to do foundational work in areas such as the Internet, software development, and genome research.

Internet security, bandwidth distribution, and genome structure are some of the current areas that are “begging for mathematical structure,” he says.

He has created a fund in the Mathematics Department in CLAS to bring other entrepreneurs and experts to campus to talk to students about how math equipped them to pursue their interests and to be entrepreneurs.

McCabe himself founded McCabe & Associates, Inc., Columbia, MD, after he spent three years in Army intelligence and then worked for the NSA, leaving in 1978.

He developed the “McCabe complexity measure,” used by IBM, Hewlett Packard, banks, the Department of Defense and insurance companies to control the complexity of their software.

He spent two years working on the mathematics of reducing complexity associated with the Year 2000 turnover. His company had grown to have 175 employees and offices around the world before he sold it in 1998 to venture capitalists.

His new research firm, McCabe Technology, is smaller and works on breakthrough ideas.

Five years ago, he started writing poetry. Like math, it lets a person directly express seminal thoughts, he says.

“Poetry is the mathematics of the heart. Mathematics is the poetry of the mind.”