Memorandum submitted by Martin Ward (FC
04)
The purpose of academic research is to push
back the boundaries of human knowledge. I believe that knowlege
is intrinsically valuable, and therefore worth pursuing regardless
of any immediate or future material benefits: this is one of the
things which distinguishes a civilised society from a savage society.
But for those who disagree: it is impossible
to measure the future value of any pure scientific research in
any meaningful way. In my own field of Computer Science, Alan
Turing's work on computability theory led to the publication of
only one highly theoretical paper.
Any "impact assessment" would have
declared this work to be worthless. But it eventually led to the
code-breaking triumph at Bletchley Park and the development of
the computer, but not even he knew that at the time.
In the early 1960's, mathematician Carol Karp
investigated the extension of the theory of mathematical logic
to expressions and formulae of infinite length. This was a piece
of pure mathematics research with, apparently, no possible applications
or "impact" whatsoever. Twenty years later, this work
turned out to have an application in the mathematical analysis
of computer algorithms: this formed the basis for my DPhil thesis
on program transformations. This was still a piece of pure research
with no immediate application.
But today, this theory forms the basis of the
FermaT Program Transformation System: which has been and is being
used by many major companies to migrate multi-million line assembler
systems running on expensive manframes to more maintainable high
level language systems running on PCs and workstations.
The companies involved in these migration projects
have included EDS, HBOS, IBM, Microfocus, Royal Bank of Scotland,
Tenovis, Tesseract and the USA Social Security Administration
and Inland Revenue Services.
January 2010
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