Litnet

Pierre de Vries is an Executive Fellow of the Silicon Flatirons Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a Visiting Senior Scientist at the Institute for Networked Systems of RWTH Aachen University. He works on modelling and managing interference between wireless systems, from a regulatory policy point of view.

He started on the science track at Stellenbosch University with high hopes, but graduate study at the University of Oxford made it clear that he wasn’t smart enough to be a theoretical physicist. After failing to land even an interview with a Who’s Who of management consultants and actuarial firms, he got a job with a small London seed capital company. (The fifteenth application letter was the charm.) After living the yuppie life in the late ’80s / early ’90s he dropped out to go to art school. He moved to the US before graduating to work for a software company that thought it might be fun to hire an art school drop-out who knew some quantum field theory. After a dozen years prototyping new technologies he quit to focus on spectrum policy, which operates at the intersection of engineering, economics and the law. His physics training helped him sound knowledgeable about radio, and the fact that neoclassical economics is little more than 19^th-century classical mechanics in wolf’s clothing helped keep the economists at bay. Sharing a set in the koshuis with law students gave him a taste for jurisprudence. He has neither waited tables in Beverly Hills nor worked as a stevedore, taxi driver, exterminator, insurance executive or bank clerk.