Author

Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking.

From Nathan Myhrvold

I wanted to figure out how long to cook things. I did some experiments and then wrote a program using Mathematica to model how heat is transferred through food.

From Nathan Myhrvold

In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.

From Nathan Myhrvold

It's really hard to compete with Apple on pure coolness, and if you do, you're probably going to use some of the things they pioneered.

From Nathan Myhrvold

In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for.

From Nathan Myhrvold

New online formats gutted the newspaper-ad business. Why pore over tiny print looking for a job in the want ads when you can tap a few keywords into monster.com, then click through and apply? Why pay a steep per-character rate for a classified when you can hawk a whole garage full of used stuff on EBay or Craigslist for free?

From Nathan Myhrvold

If you want to do interesting software, you have to have a bunch of people do it, because the amount of software that one person can do isn't that interesting.

From Nathan Myhrvold