PROFESSOR: You know, applications to technology--
a lot of the things--
a lot of the technology that we take for granted,
these days, it depends very much on nothing
more than algorithms, ideas about how things might work.
Take your iPod-- you know, an iPod
that could only hold 30 songs on it wouldn't be that useful,
but you can fit a thousand songs on there.
How is that possible?
It should be impossible.
Whether you're talking about cell phones, the internet, how
power Google search engine works,
or communications technology-- you know,
a 10 megabit internet connection is a lot more useful
than 64 kilobit connection.
All of these technologies are really
enabled by combinatorial algorithms
to a much greater extent than the hardware.
You know, the software that in [? relies ?] these technologies
is really built out of ideas that people come up
with in their heads, and a lot of those ideas
involve combinatorics.
So that's one of the reasons that I got interested in
and I think a lot of the students
find it interesting for the same reason.