A lot of people conjure the image of a mathematician as a chalk dust-covered egghead whose idea of a good time is proving Fermat's Last Theorem. Even Hollywood's Will Hunting, the James Dean of the math world, came off as distantly cerebral.

      Not so Chan and Osher. As computational and applied mathematicians, they have geared their department to sending mathematicians into the world to solve other people's problems. Chan is a rare example of a math department chairman at a major university who is an applied mathematician. Almost all others are pure mathematicians, the solitary theorists who revere the purity of the subject and rarely leave the blackboard jungles of the nonmathematical world.

      "Until about 100 years ago, much of mathematics was used to do something practical," Chan says. "When Isaac Newton invented calculus in the 17th century to study the heavens, there was no difference between pure and applied mathematics. But in this century, the subject became more inward looking. People studied math for its own sake, for its own beauty and elegance. Much of the practical origins of mathematics, unfortunately, faded to the background."

      By demonstrating mathematicians' problem-solving acuity, Chan and Osher have encouraged businesses and governments to award them funding that otherwise might go to engineers and computer scientists. They have brought in contracts to design microchips, study anti-terrorist explosives, improve airplane wing-design and create special effects for movies. The work all stems form their specialty, image processing. It explains what happens when two objects meet and create edges - whether it's a jet breaking the sound barrier, conductive material laid down on silicon or a colorful image moving on celluloid.

      "The computer has tremendously changed the way we do mathematics and science," Osher explains. "You used to just theorize, as Einstein did, or experiment, which is how Robert Mulliken discovered properties of the electron. Now with computational mathematics, you can simulate the real world - quickly - on the computer."

Reprinted by permission of Pamela S. Leven and Lysbeth B. Chuck of CQ&A, Los Angeles, and courtesy of TWA Ambassador magazine, January 1999, where it originally appeared.