She's Got Their Number

Brenda Dietrich revels in theory but lives in the real world--and her team of math geeks is changing the way IBM works.

Fast Company, February 1, 2007 — There's a calculus to knitting. An untamed batch of wool gets twisted and fed into a spinning wheel, a wooden contraption about as high-tech as an abacus, that binds the fibers into a single strand of yarn. That yarn, in turn, is woven into geometric designs comprised of equations: A certain number of rows combined with certain stitches yield something functional and beautiful. In the right hands, knitting produces a precise but almost magical alchemy--chaos into order.