EDITORIAL-Are You A Technically Literate Professional - Industrial

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EDITORIAL

INDUSTRIAL AND ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY Editor, D A V I D E. G U S H E E Editorial Headquarters 1155 Sixteenth St., N.W., Washington, D. C. 20036 Phone 202-737-3337 Teletype WA 23 Assistant Editors: Elspcth Mainland, Joseph H. S. Haggin, John A. King Manager, Research Results Service: Stella Anderson Layout and Production Joseph Jacobs Arl Director, Leroy Corcorak, Bill Caldwell (Layout) Production-Easton, Pa. Associate Editor: Charlotte C. Sayre Editorial Assistant: J a n e M. Andrews International Editorial Bureaus Frankfurt/Main, West Germany Grosse Bockenheimerstrasse 32 H. Clifford Neely London, W.1, England 77 South Audley St. Dermot A. O'Sullivan Tokyo Japan Apt. 3b6, 47 Dai-machi Akasaka, Minato-ku Patrick P. McCurdy A D V I S O R Y B O A R D Thomas Baron, R . B. Beckmann, C. 0. Bennett, E. G. Bobalek, F. G . Cia etta J. J. Fischer Brage Golding, J o h n Happel, F: Johnson, A. Jonke, F. C . McGrew, A. R . Rescorla, Arthur Rose, B. H. Sage, Joseph Stewart, T. J. Williams

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Are You a Technicallv Literate Professional? J

ne of the tenets of industrial publishing is that you lose a significant number of readers every time you publish mathematical equations more complicated than algebra. I t is a tenet well documented by reader research through surveys, interviews, and other measures of traffic through a magazine's pages. You will note that this editing premise has very little to do with how valuable the equations might be to the audience. For that same reader research has found that it is the presence of the mathematics rather than questions of value that causes the readership drop. I n the past year or two, however, there are some signs that the taboo against mathematics is weakening, as more and more chemists and engineers with strong mathematical backgrounds enter the profession. Required use of computers by undergraduate students, plus increasingly quantitative descriptions of physical and chemical phenomena, plus increasing research in applied mathematics have all combined to accelerate this weakening of the taboo. Applied mathematicians and chemical engineering scientists have been developing an extensive specialized literature among themselves over the past 15 years or so. As the mathematicians have learned to adapt the pure mathematical techniques to physical situations, the engineering scientists have been able to redefine their systems in ways that the mathematical techniques can attack. Now, after these years of effort, applied mathematics is about to become, if it hasn't already, one of the basic tools of the working chemist and chemical engineer. The "academic headscratching" has led to some convenient techniques applicable to real problems. One of the areas where this can be demonstrated is optimization, where mathematical and physical theory have grown together into what might be classed as a new subdiscipline. Our lead article this month by Douglas Wilde of Stanford University (page 18) introduces us to this new subdiscipline by surveying recent advances in optimization theory in the context of its classical foundations. The article is written for technically literate professionals not already conversant with this subdiscipline and will be a test of whether that tenet mentioned above has yet lost its teeth.

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AUGUST 1965

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