David Ross is a member of the Applied Mathematics and Statistics Group, one of two groups within the Computational Science Lab at Eastman Kodak Research Labs in Rochester, New York. Together with other members of the Lab, including chemists and physicists, he builds models for researching new products and manufacturing techniques. The primary areas of mathematics he works in are applications of partial differential equations and numerical analysis to problems generated by the needs of scientists and engineers at Kodak.
His recent work includes a manufacturing concern connected with curtain coating. Curtain coating is one method used to coat the photographic emulsion, which contains light-sensitive silver halide grains and dye-forming chemicals, onto a support to make photographic film. A thin curtain of emulsion is extruded through a slot in a hopper, falls through the air, and falls on the hard support, which is moving past on a web-like conveyor belt. The objective is to optimize the stability of the curtain coating by adjusting the surface tension. This leads to a fluid dynamics problem superimposed on a nonlinear diffusion problem. This involves the Navier-Stokes Equations coupled with a nonlinear diffusion equation.
David has been with Kodak for nine years. He enjoys the challenge of having real problems to grapple with and solve. He has a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and a B.A. in mathematics from Columbia. From the beginning, he has had a desire to solve real problems that would make a difference. So, he pursued a course of study that gave him a classical applied mathematics background. His advice to students is that they concentrate on what the mathematics means in reality by always making the connection between the physical facts and the mathematical model. He recommends that students interested in his area choose a course of study that includes numerical analysis, differential equations, statistics and some programming. It is also important to understand how scientists in other disciplines work and to appreciate that they are not mathematicians. As part of his job he must understand the concerns of the non-mathematical scientist he works with and keep the mathematics in its place, not overwhelming the scientist with mathematical terminology, but making the connections between reality and mathematics for the scientist.
David also enjoys participating in the "Kodak 21st Century Learning Challenge", a program in which Kodak employees go out into the Rochester city schools and provide a range of services. He and John Hamilton, another Kodak mathematician, visit Rochester schools where they present applied problems from film manufacturing and, in a program called "Fun with Math", they present math problems and techniques in the form of magic tricks, games, and hands-on experiments.
