Jana Gana Mana… ‘Adhinayaka’ ?

Rarely does an auteur have the fortune of starting a century of controversy from the moment he creates a piece. As a phenomenon, Rabindranath Tagore is indeed rare. And the text in question is our national anthem, born infamous exactly 101 years ago.

Not so long ago a hoax message made its rounds via chain mails and social networking sites. This was in 2008, 2010 and 2012. It claimed that UNESCO had declared Jana Gana Mana to be 'the best national anthem of the world'. In 2004, Sadhwi Ritamvara circulated a hate audio cassette against Muslims, where she claims the song was an act of treachery. Hate mails and heated responses have done the rounds every year since 2001. In the late 1960's, 1980's, each time India went to war, each time a new government formed — there has been a furor over the origin of the song.

The Morning Song of India : in Tagore's Handwriting

The Morning Song of India : in Tagore's Handwriting

Jana gana mana adhinayaka jaya hey,
Bharata bhagya bidhata….

Critics, journalists, poets, politicians, and just about everyone has wondered who this 'adhinayak' could be. The one who governs the mind of the masses i.e. the 'jana gana-mana'. We all holler that line in school without really understanding it. Some firmly believe that Tagore had meant King George V as this shadowy 'adhinayak', the guy grandly called God of India's Fate (the 'Bharat bhagya bidhata'). That's weird, given that the rest of the considerably long song (we adopted only stanza one as our anthem), mentions a mother and a conch blowing charioteer, none of whom can possibly qualify as a king.

Bengal was partitioned by Lord Curzon in 1905. Tagore was instrumental in not just writing patriotic songs against this, but in organizing protests as well. One of these songs, 'Amar Sonar Bangla', went on to become the national anthem of Bangladesh.

On 12 December, 1911, King George V and Queen Mary held durbar in Delhi. The King annulled the partition there. On December 26, the royal couple graced a somewhat different durbar, the annual session of Indian National Congress at Kolkata. The Vande Mataram, avowedly patriotic, was sung on that day. The next day begun with Jana Gana Mana, sung like a hymn in chorus, and ended with 'Badshah Humara', a song in Hindi by Rambhuj Chaudhury openly praising the King. The session ended on 28 December with 'Namo Hindusthan' by Tagore's cousin Sarala Devi, openly praising the motherland.

Singing at Congress meetings was not new for Tagore. He rendered the Vande Mataram in the 1896 session. By 1908, Tagore was older and less enthused with these annual dos. So he sang an impromptu piece 'Amay bolo na gahite' ('don't ask me to sing'), a scathing comment on the emptiness of conferences in troubled times, and stomped out. Oops. Despite the jab, his stature induced Congress leaders to invite him again in 1911. We don't know whether the monarch was happy with the song. But a month later, a circular was issued by Director of Public Instructions, East Bengal, asking government servants not to send their kids to Shanitniketan, Tagore's educational institute. It was implied that disobedience might affect their service. In January 1912, a journal 'Tatwabodhini' published the song as 'Bharat Bidhata', classifying it as 'Brahmo Sangeet'. On 25 Januray, Jana Gana Mana was sung at Maharshi Bhavan as a prayer song under Tagore's guidance. In 1917, it surfaced in the Congress session again. Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, one of the extremist leaders, introduced it as 'a song of the glory and victory of India.'

None of these incidents could stop speculations about the 'adhinayak'. On 28 December, 1911, British loyalist newspapers, 'The Englishman' and 'The Statesman', reported that Tagore had sung for the King. On the same day, patriotic newspapers, 'The Bengalee' and 'Amrita Bazar Patrika' distinguished between the welcome song and a 'song of benediction' by Tagore. Loyalties, reporting style and public taste had undergone a lot of change by 1917. Reports of 'The Statesman' that year refer to the same song as patriotic.

In 1919, Tagore translated the song for his friend, Irish poet James H. Cousins. Cousins was the principal of Besant Theosophocal College in Madanapelle, Andhra Pradesh and Tagore was on a visit. 'The Morning Song of India' was adopted as the college prayer, in praise of god and motherland.

On 10 November 1937, Tagore wrote a letter to friend Pulin Bihari Sen: 'A certain high official in His Majesty's service, who was also my friend, had requested that I write a song of felicitation towards the Emperor. The request simply amazed me. It caused a great stir in my heart. In response to that great mental turmoil, I pronounced the victory in Jana Gana Mana of that Bhagya Vidhata of India who has from age after age held steadfast the reins of India's chariot through rise and fall, through the straight path and the curved. That Lord of Destiny, that Reader of the Collective Mind of India, that Perennial Guide, could never be George V, George VI, or any other George. Even my official friend understood this about the song. After all, even if his admiration for the crown was excessive, he was not lacking in simple common sense.'

On 19 March 1939 Tagore wrote: 'I should only insult myself if I cared to answer those who consider me capable of such unbounded stupidity as to sing in praise of George the Fourth or George the Fifth as the Eternal Charioteer leading the pilgrims on their journey through countless ages of the timeless history of mankind.'

Tagore was a complicated man and a dedicated creator. This means he had a turbulent mind and a steady career as writer-poet-lyricist-educator. W.B.Yeats, one of his strongest supporters for the Nobel prize mentioned a conversation with one of Tagore's followers: 'The National Congress people asked Tagore for a poem of welcome. He tried to write it, but could not. He got up very early in the morning and wrote a very beautiful poem, not one of his best, but still beautiful. When he came down, he said to one of us, 'Here is a poem which I have written. It is addressed to God, but give it to the Congress people. It will please them. They will think it is addressed to the King.'

Given Tagore's history of outbursts against the duplicity of politicians, it does sound plausible. After all, he had the doubtful privilege of closely knowing both dedicated freedom fighters and corrupt leaders.

Back in 1919, Tagore had denounced his Knighthood in a stormy overnight letter to Lord Chelmsford protesting against the Jalianwala Bagh massacre. The song 'ei monihar amaye nahi saaje' was written that very night :
'This bejeweled necklace doesn't suit me.

It hurts when I wear it,

Stings when I take it off...'

His Congress friends were slower in responding to the disaster.

A staunch believer in economic development through self-reliance, Tagore was in disagreement with Gandhiji on the issue of arson and bribery being used to fund and promote the Swadeshi movement. In fact, the novels 'Char Odhyay' (The Four Chapters) and 'Ghore Baire' (The Home and The World) revolve entirely around the Swadeshi debate. These however, are not as controversial as the national anthem. The 'adhinayak' continues to be debated in seminars, books, reports, forums, blogs. The deeper questions that Tagore brought up repeatedly in his works, on what 'India' and 'Indian' might mean, have been archived and forgotten. India and Bangladesh keep locking horns along the line of partition. 'Their' national anthem was penned by Tagore as a protest against the partition. 'Our' anthem was probably a hope and prayer at the annulment of the partition. In 2012, what a hot-headed man sung in 1908 continues to hold true of our national political scenario.

'Amay bolo na gahite, bolo na.

Eki shudhu haasi khela promodero mela?

Shudhu micche kotha chholona?'

Translation :

'Don't ask me to sing. Don't.

Is it just fun, games and merry making ?

Only false words and deception?'

99labels.com

'I did not want to wait till 40 to be a CEO'

“Even when I was in college I was sitting with the new business idea every week, so the thought of doing something on my own was never out of the question” says this economic graduate who completed her MBA from IMT and is now founder and CEO of e-commerce giant 99labels.com

Leap of Faith

The brilliant entrepreneur was spotted by Cadbury’s soon after her MBA completed. After a three-and-a-half year stint with Cadbury, where she handled the brand management of both the confectionary division and Cadbury’s Dollops ice-cream, Ishita was itching to do something on her own. Reason, there was nothing left to learn, and Ishita liked the learning curve’s upwardly movement more. So she quit Cadbury’s and teamed up with a school time friend to start up her first company called the Orion Dialogue which was going to be instrumental in the ITES sector in India and one of the first to focus solely on the Indian market.

“We did our research before jumping to the business bandwagon. Back in the 1994-95 the BPO industry was just starting out and it was a good time to venture into the same. We did our research and with as good as no money in our pockets and no backing we took a big leap of faith and founded what we called the Orion Dialogue private limited company” she tells proudly.

There were many times when she and her business partner would approach investors with a business plan and they would turn her away asking her to get her father and then they would discuss things further or would simply not take them seriously enough.However, in the 11-year-run that Orion Dialogue had, Ishita and her partner now were operating out of three offices from different cities in India which was quite an achievement she tells.

After leading the company to great heights, it was bought out by Aegis BPO in 2006 leaving Swarup to achieve even greater heights. While she was deciding her next venture, Ishita also helped setting up businesses and consulting other women entrepreneurs.

99labels.com

99labels is a pioneering innovative concept introduced to India for the first time. Partnering national and international brands, 99labels presents event based online sales for a limited time period giving members an opportunity to buy fashion-wear, accessories, lifestyle products at up to 90% off label prices.
The idea of 99labels.com says Ishita made a lot of sense as a consumer. She says, 99labels offers an exclusive chance for people to buy credible, branded items from a reliable source at discounted prices and from the privacy and convenience of their own home. So from a consumer’s point of view it was a win-win situation. E-commerce was big abroad and people in India had started to accept the idea and hence there was huge potential for a site like 99lables.com here. Swarup further adds that the timing of entering the market seemed perfect too.

The journey was new, uncharted tough and yet rewarding. Two years ago we started as an 8 member team and launched two sales per day. Today, we have a growing team of 120 employees and have partnered with more than 250 brand partners and consequently held over 5000 sales. Having said that you should know that despite our current success we are only aiming higher!

On being a woman entrepreneur

Ishita says that she always wanted to do something of her own. “You see I never wanted to wait till I was forty-years-old to become a CEO. I became a CEO at the age of 25, when the rest of my friends or ex-colleagues were cribbing about their unsatisfying jobs.

Ishita personally feels that being an entrepreneur itself empowers a person, and if a woman wants to build a career as an entrepreneur there is nothing that is more satisfying. She even feels that being a woman entrepreneur has more advantages than otherwise.

“Being an entrepreneur gives women the freedom to work the way she wants to, when she wants to and how she wants to. A woman sometimes struggles more in the corporate world than when she works on her own terms” she quips. As an entrepreneur gets to explore more and push her limits which is not really possible when it comes to working in a structured atmosphere. She even says that now is the time to start your own ventures, when the market is ready, investors is ready and when the mindsets too are ready to accept women who run their own show.

MAGICAL QUOTES OF WARREN BUFFET

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2010

25 Megical Quotes from Warren Buffett

He’s called the Oracle of Omaha, and for good reason: not only is he one of the best investors of all time, but he’s also a witty communicator. Here are twenty-five awesome quotes from the man himself-Warren Buffett.

On Investing
1. “Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.”
2. “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”
3. “Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”
4. “We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.”
5. “Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful”.”
On Success
1. “Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.”
2. “The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.”
3. “You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.”
4. “Can you really explain to a fish what it’s like to walk on land? One day on land is worth a thousand years of talking about it, and one day running a business has exactly the same kind of value.”
5. “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”
On Helping Others
1. “If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”
2. “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
3. “I don’t have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It’s like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don’t do that though. I don’t use very many of those claim checks. There’s nothing material I want very much. And I’m going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die.”
4. “It’s class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn’t be.”
5. “My family won’t receive huge amounts of my net worth. That doesn’t mean they’ll get nothing. My children have already received some money from me and Susie and will receive more. I still believe in the philosophy - FORTUNE quoted me saying this 20 years ago - that a very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.”
On Life
1. “Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
2. “We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.”
3. “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”
4. “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
5. “A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.”
Funny Ones
1. “A girl in a convertible is worth five in the phonebook.”
2. “When they open that envelope, the first instruction is to take my pulse again.”
3. “We believe that according the name ‘investors’ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‘romantic.’”
4. “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.”
5. “In the insurance business, there is no statute of limitation on stupidity.”

10 essential foods for female health

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   10 essential foods for female health

   
   

   
   

   1.Walnuts While all nuts are great for our health, walnuts have many great individual benefits for women. A study has recently found that walnuts, which are packed with omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants and phytosterols, may help to reduce women's risk of developing breast cancer, while their high omega-3 content may also help bone health, arthritis pain and depression. Walnuts also contain many nutrients essential for female health, such as ... more Walnuts While all nuts are great for our health, walnuts have many great individual benefits for women. A study has recently found that walnuts, which are packed with omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants and phytosterols, may help to reduce women's risk of developing breast cancer, while their high omega-3 content may also help bone health, arthritis pain and depression. Walnuts also contain many nutrients essential for female health, such as calcium, magnesium and folic acid. less Figs are a great health food, containing many vital minerals and vitamins as well as contributing to your daily portions of fruit and veg. Two minerals found in figs that are particularly beneficial to women's health are iron, which is often deficient in menstruating women, and calcium, which is important for post-menopausal women, who are more prone to osteoporosis.

   
   

   Flax seeds are a good source of Omega-3 fatty acids and have been linked to reduced risk of breast cancer and heart disease. The seeds' anti-inflammatory properties are also good for preventing arthritis, while their digestive benefits can help irritable bowel syndrome; two painful conditions which are more prevalent in women than men

   

   Milk is a great source of calcium, which is extremely beneficial to women's health, particularly when combined with vitamin D (found in some varieties of milk and many fortified milk products). Consumption of the combined nutrients is not only good for warding off osteoporosis, but a study has suggested that a diet rich in calcium and vitamin D could ease, or even prevent, symptoms of PMS.PrevNextOats are literally packed with health-boosting nutrients, many of which have great impacts on female health. Oats are not only great for heart health, digestion and blood pressure levels (with hypertension affecting many women over 50), but they contain vitamin B6, which can help prevent PMS and mood swings, and folic acid, which is important for women to consume before and during pregnancy to prevent birth defects in babies.Salmon has a multitude of positive health benefits for women. Not only is it rich in iron — which is integral to the diets of premenopausal women — but it is packed with omega-3 fatty acids, known for their mood-enhancing effects. Studies have suggested that omega-3 can help beat depression (something that affects twice as many women as men) and prevent mood swings, while salmon can also boost babies' intelligence when eaten during pregnancy.... 

   Spinach is rich in many different vitamins and minerals, but one thing that makes it great for women is its high content of magnesium. Research has shown that magnesium may be beneficial in reducing many of the physical symptoms of PMS which plague women, including reduction of swelling, breast tenderness, bloating and weight gain.Tomatoes Another vibrant carotenoid beneficial for women's health is lycopene, a pigment found in tomatoes. Studies have suggested that lycopene may be effective in preventing breast cancer. Furthermore, there has been considerable evidence to suggest that the powerful antioxidant can help reduce risk of heart disease — the leading cause of death in women in the US, Australia, England and Wales.Walnuts While all nuts are great for our health, walnuts have many great individual benefits for women. A study has recently found that walnuts, which are packed with omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants and phytosterols, may help to reduce women's risk of developing breast cancer, while their high omega-3 content may also help bone health, arthritis pain and depression. Walnuts also contain many nutrients essential for female health, such as ... 

   Butternut squash Like many other yellow/orange fruit and vegetables — is packed with carotenoids such as alpha-carotene and beta-carotene. While carotenes should be included in everybody's diet for optimum health, they may prove essential to women's health as a high-carotenoid diet has been linked to lowered risks of both breast and ovarian cancer.

   

   
   

   
   

   Cranberries Various studies have suggested strong links between consuming cranberries and reduced risks of breast cancer and heart disease. However, the most notorious benefit of cranberries is their ability to prevent and cure urinary tract infections such as cystitis, which is eight times more likely to occur in women than men. One study suggests that drinking two glasses of cranberry juice a day can prevent the symptoms of common UTIs 

   
   

   
   

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Srinivas Gundluri & Ors. Vs.M/s SEPCO Electric Power Construction Corporation & Ors ~ Judgements

Srinivas Gundluri & Ors. Vs.M/s SEPCO Electric Power Construction Corporation & Ors ~ Judgements

Math Will Rock Your World

Math Will Rock Your World

A generation ago, quants turned finance upside down. Now they're mapping out ad campaigns and building new businesses from mountains of personal data

COVER STORY PODCAST

Neal Goldman is a math entrepreneur. He works on Wall Street, where numbers rule. But he's focusing his analytic tools on a different realm altogether: the world of words.

Goldman's startup, Inform Technologies LLC, is a robotic librarian. Every day it combs through thousands of press articles and blog posts in English. It reads them and groups them with related pieces. Inform doesn't do this work alphabetically or by keywords. It uses algorithms to analyze each article by its language and context. It then sends customized news feeds to its users, who also exist in Inform's system as -- you guessed it -- math.

How do you convert written words into math? Goldman says it takes a combination of algebra and geometry. Imagine an object floating in space that has an edge for every known scrap of information. It's called a polytope and it has near-infinite dimensions, almost impossible to conjure up in our earthbound minds. It contains every topic written about in the press. And every article that Inform processes becomes a single line within it. Each line has a series of relationships. A single article on Bordeaux wine, for example, turns up in the polytope near France, agriculture, wine, even alcoholism. In each case, Inform's algorithm calculates the relevance of one article to the next by measuring the angle between the two lines.

By the time you're reading these words, this very article will exist as a line in Goldman's polytope. And that raises a fundamental question: If long articles full of twists and turns can be reduced to a mathematical essence, what's next? Our businesses -- and, yes, ourselves.

The world is moving into a new age of numbers. Partnerships between mathematicians and computer scientists are bulling into whole new domains of business and imposing the efficiencies of math. This has happened before. In past decades, the marriage of higher math and computer modeling transformed science and engineering. Quants turned finance upside down a generation ago. And data miners plucked useful nuggets from vast consumer and business databases. But just look at where the mathematicians are now. They're helping to map out advertising campaigns, they're changing the nature of research in newsrooms and in biology labs, and they're enabling marketers to forge new one-on-one relationships with customers. As this occurs, more of the economy falls into the realm of numbers. Says James R. Schatz, chief of the mathematics research group at the National Security Agency: "There has never been a better time to be a mathematician."

From fledglings like Inform to tech powerhouses such as IBM (IBM ), companies are hitching mathematics to business in ways that would have seemed fanciful even a few years ago. In the past decade, a sizable chunk of humanity has moved its work, play, chat, and shopping online. We feed networks gobs of digital data that once would have languished on scraps of paper -- or vanished as forgotten conversations. These slices of our lives now sit in databases, many of them in the public domain. From a business point of view, they're just begging to be analyzed. But even with the most powerful computers and abundant, cheap storage, companies can't sort out their swelling oceans of data, much less build businesses on them, without enlisting skilled mathematicians and computer scientists.

The rise of mathematics is heating up the job market for luminary quants, especially at the Internet powerhouses where new math grads land with six-figure salaries and rich stock deals. Tom Leighton, an entrepreneur and applied math professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says: "All of my students have standing offers at Yahoo! (YHOO ) and Google (GOOG )." Top mathematicians are becoming a new global elite. It's a force of barely 5,000, by some guesstimates, but every bit as powerful as the armies of Harvard University MBAs who shook up corner suites a generation ago.

Math entrepreneurs, meanwhile, are raking in bonanzas. Fifteen months ago, Neal Goldman of Inform sold his previous math-based startup, a financial analysis company called CapitalIQ, for $225 million to Standard & Poor's (MHP ) (like BusinessWeek, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies). And last May two brothers, Amit and Balraj Singh, sold Perabit Networks -- a company that developed algorithms for genetic research -- to Juniper Networks (JNPR ) for $337 million.

In a world teeming with data, we ourselves become the math nerds' most prized specimens. Researchers at Aetna Health Care, Amazon.com (AMZN ), and many other companies are piecing together mathematical models of customers and employees. Some models predict what music we'll buy, others figure out which worker is best equipped for a particular job. For now, these models are crude, the digital equivalent of stick figures. But over the coming decade, each of us will give birth to far more fleshed out simulations of ourselves. We'll be modeled as workers, shoppers, voters, and patients. Some of the simulations will have our names and credit cards attached, perhaps a few genetic details. In others, our identities will be shielded. Many of these models will be eerily accurate and others laughably off mark. But companies and governments will use them all the same to predict how to sell us things, steer us clear of diseases, and ramp up our productivity. And yes, they'll try to use them to keep us from hijacking airplanes or detonating bombs.

This mathematical modeling of humanity promises to be one of the great undertakings of the 21st century. It will grow in scope to include much of the physical world as mathematicians get their hands on new flows of data, from atmospheric sensors to the feeds from millions of security cameras. It's a parallel world that's taking shape, a laboratory for innovation and discovery composed of numbers, vectors, and algorithms. "We turn the world of content into math, and we turn you into math," says Howard Kaushansky, CEO of Boulder (Colo.)-based Umbria Inc., a company that uses math to analyze marketing trends online.

The Dark Side
This industrial metamorphosis also has a dark side. The power of mathematicians to make sense of personal data and to model the behavior of individuals will inevitably continue to erode privacy. Merchants will be in a position to track many of our most intimate purchases, and employers will be able to rank us not only by productivity, but by wasted minutes. What's more, the rise of math can contribute to a sense that individuals are powerless, a foreboding that mathematics, from our credit rating to our genomic map, spells out our destiny.

Debates over these issues have flared up many times in the past decade. And they are sure to rear up again as the U.S. Congress investigates the Bush Administration's mining of phone and Internet traffic in its effort to sniff out terrorists. But the merger of sophisticated data mining and higher math has tremendous power to conquer mankind's scourges as well. As Jack Einhorn, chief technical officer of Inform, puts it: "The next Jonas Salk will be a mathematician, not a doctor."

The clearest example of math's disruptive power is in advertising. There Google and other search companies built on math are turning an industry that grew on ideas, hunches, and personal relationships into a series of calculations. They can pull it off because, quite simply, they know where their prospective customers are browsing, what they click on, and often, what they buy. Internet companies use this data not only to profile customers but also to pitch for more contracts. Some 18 months ago, 30 blue-chip companies, from Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) to Walt Disney Co. (DIS ), underwent a series of tests promoted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry group. These studies crunched consumer data to measure the effectiveness of advertising in a host of media. The results came back in hard numbers. They indicated, for example, that Ford Motor Co. (F ) could have sold an additional $625 million worth of trucks if it had lifted its online ad budget from 2.5% to 6% of the total. Ford responded vigorously: Last August it announced plans to move up to 30% of its $1 billion ad budget into media targeted to individual customers, half of it through online advertising. Such moves are sure to generate even more data, giving greater clout to the numbers people.

Just ask Imran Khan, the director of search advertising at E-Loan, an online lender. An accountant by training, Khan has turned the advertising operation into an enormous statistical laboratory. Like most others in the industry, he started three years ago by bidding on keywords on the major search engines. Over time, Khan's team has amassed a portfolio of 250,000 key words and phrases. Each time a Web surfer types one of those words in a search engine, an E-Loan ad appears next to the results, and Khan's team pays the price bid for each click. But running search-based ads is hardly a static process. Working with Efficient Frontier Inc., an analytics startup in Silicon Valley, Khan crunches his stash of words, calculating the return on investment for each one and tweaking thousands of bids hour by hour. He spends $15 million a year -- half of E-Loan's ad budget -- and he accumulates massive feedback from customers.

As data mavens gather more information about customers, they gain muscle to demand changes inside companies. Take media. With banks of consumer data continuing to swell, quants on the marketing side will be able to provide editors and program managers with increasingly sophisticated statistical models, telling them which types of TV scenes or articles appeal most to certain demographic groups. As publishers seek to optimize profits and performance, data analysis will grow in importance. The risk: It gives math-based analysts, not to mention advertisers, a growing role in editorial decisions. "It puts a question mark around the classic church-state divide in the media," says Rex Briggs, founder of Marketing Evolution, the San Francisco company that conducted the 30 advertising studies.

Rising flows of data give companies the intelligence to home in on the individual customer. Internet marketers are the natural leaders, but traditional businesses are following suit. Gary W. Loveman, CEO of casino giant Harrah's Entertainment Inc. (HET ) and a former Harvard B-school professor, has led the company to build individual profiles of millions of Harrah's customers. The models include gamblers' ages, gender, and Zip codes, as well as the amount of time they spent gambling and how much they won or lost. These data enable Harrah's to study gambling through a host of variables and to target individuals with offers, from getaway weekends to gourmet dining, calculated to maximize returns. In the last five years, Harrah's has averaged 22% annual growth, and its stock has nearly tripled.

Pi in the Sky
Math is also positioned to shake up investigations. Whether in law, journalism, or criminal detective work, sleuths have relied for centuries on the human brain to pick through strands of disparate evidence and to find patterns. Sherlock Holmes sometimes looked for them in plumes of pipe smoke. And why not? Even today, no machine could sift through the photos, names, words, geographical coordinates, snippets of video -- that towering mountain of information that computer scientists call "unstructured data."

But some companies are making inroads. Colorado's Umbria has built a system to sift through millions of blogs in real time, looking for market intelligence. Umbria breaks down English messages into the smallest components -- words, phrases, grammar, even emotions -- and turns them into math. Then it analyzes the content, looking for trends. It can give cell-phone companies or fast-food restaurants the latest buzz on an ad campaign or a new sandwich.

Sometimes it uncovers trends researchers weren't even looking for. A recent search for Gatorade (PEP ), for example, showed that large numbers of young men look to it as a cocktail mixer in hopes that the electrolytes in the sports drink will ease hangovers. In the future, similar insights could uncover countless other patterns. They could help bankers spot entrepreneurs careening toward bankruptcy or point police toward sociopaths planning terrorist acts.

At the Sunnyvale (Calif.) campus of Yahoo, chief researcher Prabhakar Raghavan heads a team of 100 mathematicians and computer scientists. Scribbling on a white board covered with equations, Raghavan describes Yahoo's immense pool of data, featuring the online activity of 200 million registered customers, as Yahoo's most precious resource. There is a whole world of uninvented businesses, he believes. They'll come into being as Yahoo discovers new ways to satisfy the urges, curiosities, and desires of this customer base. The hints of these future businesses float in the oceans of Yahoo's data. Raghavan's mandate is to sift through that data and form new connections among consumers, e-marketers, and advertisers. Better algorithms, he says, "are critical to survival."

As companies continue to receive ever more data about their own processes and their workers, many will use math to boost productivity and shake up the workplace. This doesn't have to be limited to one company. Vast globe-spanning projects can be modeled, then cut into tiny pieces, with each task going to the best-qualified person. Pierre Haren, CEO of Paris-based ILOG, a company that turns customers' raw data into visual displays, foresees virtual assembly lines. "We'll have systems that tap our knowledge by the minute," he says. "Productivity could rise by a factor of 10."

That may sound like more digital pi in the sky. It's actually an extension of mathematical modeling that's been going on for half a century at companies like IBM. Following World War II, researchers at Big Blue constructed a mathematical model of the company's supply chain. It featured raw materials, trucking schedules, and manufacturing plants. Once the company had a working model, it put it through a mathematical analysis called optimization. The results suggested specific improvements, and the rejiggering sped up IBM's operations and cut costs. Decades later, IBM turned optimization into a leg of its services business. Today, IBM consultants are implementing math-based blueprints to upgrade steel mills in China and revamp operations at the U.S. Postal Service.

If you look back at those old supply-chain programs, there's one important element nearly absent: the human being. People were represented by numbers and were largely interchangeable. The mathematicians' systems lacked the data to provide more detail. And even if they had amassed a huge pile of it, the primitive computers of the time would have choked on it.

Now, though, at an IBM research center a half-hour's drive north of New York City, a 40-member team of researchers is scrutinizing people. The team combines data miners, statisticians, and experts in operations research. The current project is to refocus the supply-chain programs on 50,000 of the consultants in IBM's services division. That means that instead of modeling machines, furnaces, and schedules, they're building models of their colleagues.

A leader in this effort is Syrian-born Samer Takriti, who came from the math shop at Enron Corp. Years before the accounting mess brought the company down, Enron pioneered advanced math to create new financial markets. IBM hired Takriti for a second stint in 2000, a year before Enron's collapse. Big Blue named him senior manager of stochastic analysis. That's the science of incorporating random behavior, including the meanderings of humans, into math models.

The first step in modeling IBM's workforce, says Takriti, is to harvest all sorts of data from company records. To date, these professionals are divided into 200 categories. But the math team is hunting for richer personal details. A survey of company e-mail, Takriti says, could highlight communication links between employees and the informal social networks that they create. Workers who e-mail each other a lot are more likely to work well together. Calendar data could show which consultants have more free time. Eventually, by tracking mobile devices, the system will know exactly where the consultants are. And when a contract comes through for, say, a new call center in Manila, IBM's optimization program will cull through its global database and put together the perfect team.

Calculus Ahead
The program will take years to implement. "People are complicated," says Takriti. "If you have a system, they figure out how to game it. Machines never do." This means the researchers will have to factor in a certain amount of human behavior, from lowballing sales targets to "accidentally" deleting a rival's snazzy report. This threatens to make the models fuzzier. Still, if IBM's operation yields fruit, you can bet that Big Blue will be offering similar workforce modeling services to its customers.

Eventually IBM-like programs will reach us. And it doesn't take much imagination to see where that can lead. Managers will operate tools not only to monitor employees' performance but also to follow their movements and drive up productivity. Perhaps, like Internet marketers, they'll even have the tools to link these initiatives to revenue or return on investment. On the other side, consumers will be armed with ever more data, from predictive models of real estate markets to patient mortality charts for comparing different oncologists.

It adds up to an era chock-full of numbers. Outfitting students with the right quantitative skills is a crucial test facing school boards and education ministries worldwide. This is especially true in America. The U.S. has long leaned on foreigners to provide math talent in universities and corporate research labs. Even in the post-September 11 world, where it is harder for foreigners to get student visas, an estimated half of the 20,000 math grad students now in the U.S. are foreign-born. A similar pattern holds for many other math-based professions, from computer science to engineering.

The challenge facing the U.S. now is twofold. On one hand, the country must breed more top-notch mathematicians at home, especially as foreigners find greater opportunities abroad. This will require revamping education, engaging more girls and ethnic minorities in math, and boosting the number of students who make it through calculus, the gateway for math-based disciplines. "It's critical to the future of our technological society," says Michael Sipser, head of the mathematics department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the same time, school districts must cultivate greater math savvy among the broader population to prepare it for a business world in which numbers will pop up continuously. This may well involve extending the math curriculum to include more applied subjects such as statistics.

Private Lives
One significant challenge to the math revolution is to build new businesses from data without sacrificing privacy. If customers, patients, and workers have reason to fear that the intimate details of their lives are floating around in databases, they'll likely work to lock up their information or move it off network. This could disrupt efforts to use math and data mining to fight disease and to battle terrorism. The goal now is to create systems that share group information while shielding the individual. This way, researchers working with a database of HIV or breast cancer patients, for example, could study them by age, race, income, medication, education, and neighborhood without zeroing in on one person.

Mathematicians are at the heart of the privacy battle -- on both sides. In Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT ) laboratories near San Francisco, Cynthia Dwork, a cryptographer, is working on a system to shield individuals while making use of the data. Dwork and her team are encasing each person's records in a camouflage of numbers that she calls "noise." Think of looking at a picture of a crowd. As soon as you zoom in on an individual face, it becomes pixelated. It's a promising approach, but even Dwork admits that mathematically gifted hackers can continue to pry open doors that she and her team slam shut. "As cryptographers, we know the power of the adversary," she says.

Math's other problem? Sometimes it's just not as smart as advertised. As mathematicians expand their domain into the humanities, they're working with new data, much of it untested. "It's very possible for people to misplace faith in numbers," says Craig Silverstein, director of technology at Google. The antidote at Google and elsewhere is to put mathematicians on teams with specialists from other disciplines, including the social sciences.

Just as mathematicians need to grapple with human quirks and mysteries, managers and entrepreneurs must bone up on mathematics. Midcareer managers can delegate much of this work to their staffers. But they still must understand enough about math to question the assumptions behind the numbers. "Now it's easier for people to bamboozle someone by having analysis based on lots of data and graphs," says Paul C. Pfleiderer, a finance professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "We have to train people in business to spot a bogus argument."

And to spot opportunities. As more of the world's information is pooled into mathematics, the realm of numbers becomes an ever larger meeting ground. It's a percolating laboratory full of surprising connections, and a birthplace for new industries. Yes, it's a magnificent time to know math.

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