Hello, I'm Moti Ben-Ari and I appreciate
your interest in my oral history. I'd like
to tell you about an event that happened when
I worked as a software engineer on a flight
control project. It is not hard to see that
an airplane can rotate in three dimensions.
One of the computational tasks in flight control
is to transform the position of an aircraft
after an arbitrary rotation. The computations
can be done using trigonometry, but this has
numerical and physical problems. It can be
done more efficiently and with greater stability
using quaternions, which are a generalization
of complex numbers sometimes called imaginary
numbers, as if they didn't really exist. My
software group was called upon to implement
the algorithms, but since I never like doing
things I don't understand, I spent a couple
of days in the library learning about quaternions.
I wrote a report explaining the details of
the algorithms and why they work. The aeronautical
engineers later told me that they, too, found
the report useful. Computer science is a fascinating
profession because you get to be involved
in the applications themselves -- in this
case, aeronautics. Don't limit your studies
just to computer science, learning about software
systems. I suggest that you learn the basic
and stable principles of computer science
together with an application area in science
or engineering. You'll never regret having
a broad education.
