Entrepreneur of the Year: Ping Fu

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"Now I think y'all will agree with me that a person's gotta have meanin' in his life," the presenter goes on. "Everybody wants to live for somethin'--am I right?"

Edelsbrunner decides he has heard enough. "Not necessarily," he objects, speaking with the accent of his native Austria. "People often find the pursuit of meaning to be a burden. They prefer to live quite contentedly on a more superficial level."

"That's right!" a voice agrees from the back of the room. "Ignorance is bliss!"

The chorus is joined by four or five more Geomagic staffers. A mist of sweat rises on the good old boy's upper lip. His eyes dart around the room, finally coming to rest on Ping Fu.

The CEO retains her attentive smile, but makes no further move to save the man. Ping always encourages her employees to express their opinions. Given her past in China, it would be impossible for her to do otherwise. But by the same token, given her past, she cannot brook chaos. So, still smiling, she transmits a nonverbal message. To her employees: Let off some steam, but keep it in line. To the good old boy: Get to Myers-Briggs.

The two parties catch their respective beams. The presenter wipes off the grease board and draws the survey's four sensibility quadrants. The engineers, meanwhile, bring out their copies of the test. They do so eagerly, but somewhat sheepishly. Based on Jungian archetypes, and consisting of a short list of simple multiple-choice questions, the Myers-Briggs test seems as unscientific as a horoscope. And yet it proves uncannily accurate in defining a person's sensibility. In some ways the test resembles the workings of DSSP, projecting a near-perfect model of a complex, dynamic reality from fragmented shards of data.

"Who would like to share their results?" the presenter asks hopefully.

Ping raises her hand. "INTP," she says in a quiet, lightly accented voice.

The presenter beams. INTPs (people who, in Briggs-Myers parlance, tend toward introversion rather than extroversion, intuition rather than sensing, thinking rather than feeling, and perceiving rather than judging) seek to develop logical explanations for everything that interests them, he says. They are quiet, contained, flexible, and adaptable, and can focus in depth to solve problems in their area of interest. They are hungry to understand, control, predict, and explain.

"Scratch an INTP," the presenter concludes, "and you will find a scientist."

After a beat of impressed silence, he asks confidently, "Now, who wants to go next?" Forty hands shoot up, including that of Edelsbrunner. From within Ping Fu a true smile builds.

Rob Black operates out of an ordinary-looking cubicle at Geomagic headquarters in Research Triangle Park, an anomalous wedge of exurbia lying among the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, in the heart of North Carolina. RTP, as the area is locally known, is a place where high tech meets the traditional tobacco road, and gleaming business parks sprout among deep forests of loblolly pine. In 1998, Ping Fu chose to relocate here because Champaign-Urbana, Ill., Geomagic's birthplace, was so far removed from the tech boom's coastal capitals. At the time, in-demand programmers balked at moving to the Midwest cornfields, where, as Ping's former charge Mark Andreessen once complained, the odor of pig manure wafted through the halls of the University of Illinois's supercomputing center.

Black, a mechanical engineer, joined Geomagic in 1999, shortly after the move. He now serves as an account executive, demonstrating Geomagic Qualify and Geomagic Studio, the company's two core products, for customers.

"This is as accurate a model of that turbine as is humanly possible to render," Black says, nodding to the computer monitor in his cubicle, upon which the

3-D image of a component of a jet engine turbine slowly spins, in full color and precise scale, strikingly artful in its Andy Warhol-like artlessness. A few moments earlier, in an adjacent workroom, this image existed as a point cloud, a starburst of pixel light spilling across the black empty sky of another computer monitor. A laser scanner--a three-foot-long appendage-like device that resembles an X-ray machine at a hospital fracture clinic--shot out thousands of invisible beams, which struck the turbine at thousands of points over its variegated surface. The point cloud produced an impressionistic shadow image of the turbine; the turbine as if painted by Seurat.

Point clouds form a decisive step in the DSSP process, Black explains, and distinguish the technology from its cousin, computer-aided design and manufacturing, or CAD/CAM. In CAD/CAM, the designer creates the product, employing the software as a digitally enhanced pencil and drawing board. In DSSP, by contrast, the designer does not create. The image on the screen originates from the product itself, not the hand, brain, and eye of a human.

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