Employment with Dow Chemical
I left Toronto to work for Dow Chemical in Plaquemine, Louisiana, my hometown from the age of 10. I left Toronto in 1980, just as Dow had begun using computers for measurement, prediction, and control of process behavior. With my computer background I was skilled in programming and found my niche in utilizing computers and mathematics to gather, store, and utilize process data to improve production performance.
My passion for mathematics didn’t go away — I just moved down from the mathematics of spaces to the math of sets and relations. In Plaquemine I led a group that designed and implemented a system called InfoStill that enabled quick and useful access to historical 1-second data for some 80,000 signals in 29 production plants within the Louisiana Division.
Success with InfoStill led the company to move me and my family to Terneuzen to work with a research group charged with designing computer processes to manage and utilize HUGE flows of data from instrumentation. That project was associated with the design of the sixth generation of Dow’s proprietary control system. Eventually Dow dropped the project in favor of commercial automation and control systems.
We returned from Terneuzen in 1991 and at the end of the year I left Dow to create a new company - Data Refining Technologies - for developing signal-processing software using real-time processing relational mathematics (not relational database software).
