傅苹是个成功的企业家吗？

John Gage says:

PW, you are right. You clearly have read Ping Fu's pages 151 to 156, where she says exactly that. As you know, Herbert Edelsbrunner pioneered computational geometry and alpha shapes, and when he and Ping Fu, his wife, took their life savings to invest to start their company, they hired two technical students to turn his algorithms into software products: Mike Facello and Dmitry Nekhayev, who still work at Geomagic. You could ask them about her understanding of geometry, but I think that misses the point. Herbert Edelsbrunner didn't want to deal with raising money and answering the phone. As Ping Fu says, "He had depth and I had breadth. He was the mastermind behind the technology and I focused on developing the applications and markets. ...Although we used Herbert's mathematical insights and elegant algorithms to build our software at the beginning, it soon became clear that he wasn't interested in the business issues."
Thank you for pointing out what the real subject of Ping Fu's book is--how to weave advanced science and mathematics into the fabric of a company, and how, often, the science and technology is the easy part. Believe me, Steve Jobs never understood the fine points of computer networks or computer languages---we used to tease him that he couldn't spell TCP/IP---but he was a genius at forming a business based on products that used the most advanced technology. You'd be amused: in the very early days, Steve Jobs insisted on using Berkeley's IEEE standard floating point arithmetic, on the first Macintosh, in 1984, because it was standard....and Cray never did. So the little Macintosh would get correct answers on complicated physics algorithms, and Cray would get different answers on the same software.