I’m from Spartanburg, South Carolina. I grew up there in the 70s and 80s. I went to school for chemistry and specialized in computational chemistry. I’ve always loved physics, math, and computing, and in my career I have applied math and modeling to advance science or solve real-world business problems.

I went to a nearly all-white high school. My father was the headmaster. He was not a racist. As evidence, before I was born, when my brother was an infant, he and my mother traveled by car from where they lived in Illinois to attend the March on Washington where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Our leaders are not solely responsible for the faults of our society. We all are. It’s up to all of us to change it.

I thought I could escape the dissonance that I couldn’t really grasp by attending school in California. I was wrong. The college that I attended was nearly all-white as well and predominantly male. Still, we, the students, didn’t talk about it.

My experience with using genetic algorithms for optimization leads me to believe that innovation is dependent on possessing a diversity of thought and ideas. This includes cultural diversity as well. UN peacekeeping forces have added women to the ranks and discovered that the units with women were more disciplined and, perhaps obvious after the fact, that the women soldiers supported rape victims better than the male soldiers. Perhaps development teams would be less dysfunctional and achieve a higher performance if some or many of them had experienced society’s unfair judgment and knew what it was like to be supported by a strong and loving community, united for a common cause. Slower to judge and quicker to support each other to achieve a common goal — sounds like good teamwork, doesn’t it?