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Entrepreneur of the Year: Ping Fu

The man left, while Ping watched in bewilderment. He padlocked the door from the outside. For three days--the same seemingly endless span of time she was locked away in prison--Ping stayed in the house with the three children. When the food ran out, she stood on a chair at a half-open window and screamed one of her three words of English: Help.

A neighbor heard and called the police. After much confusion and many tears the police sorted out the mess. They delivered Ping to the university.

That was the first and, thus far, the last terrible thing to happen to Ping Fu in America. At the university she quickly mastered English and excelled in her studies. Her teachers loved her, as did the restaurant owners for whom she waited tables and the homeowners for whom she scrubbed bathrooms. Ping was intelligent, serious, ferociously hard working and disciplined. But she was also, she understood, detached, somehow apart.

Ping had transferred to a master's program in comparative literature, but the market for such skills was discouraging. She had to find a way to earn a living. What could she do? Nothing--and everything. If her past in China had left aching gaps in her education and in her heart, it had also left her open to any possibility. Ping knew how to listen, think, and learn. She was a good writer with an exceptional ear for languages. Why not master another new language? she asked herself. Why not learn to write software? She switched programs yet again, and began to study computer science.

In 1997, Russ Emerick was diagnosed with a high-grade form of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. It meant enduring a harrowing course of chemotherapy, and it meant spending a great deal of time under the rays of a computer-aided tomography, or CAT, scanner.

Emerick lived in Amana, Iowa, and worked as a staff designer for Schneider Electric Corp.'s Square D brand, a leading manufacturer of circuit breakers. One day at the hospital, as he lay on the table that inched glacially into the CAT tube, his mind turned to the plastic molded cover for one of Square D's breakers.

That particular cover comprised 1,295 separate dimensions. In order to digitally inspect the device, engineers had to pass each of those dimensions through a laborious process that entailed converting the 3-D object to a 2-D digital graphic, then transferring it back to 3-D. The cost was $12.50 per dimension, and it took a highly skilled, well-paid designer three weeks to complete the inspection.

The table eased into the CAT tube. The X-rays probed Emerick's tissues and organs, simultaneously beaming them onto the radiologist's computer monitor in a precise, 3-D rendering.

We live in a 3-D world, Emerick reflected, but even a genius like Leonardo da Vinci drew in 2-D. The most sophisticated industries still hadn't progressed far beyond da Vinci. Why was it that a radiologist could use a scanner to sound the complexities of the human body, and Emerick couldn't use a similar process to inspect a plastic circuit-breaker cover?

The treatments succeeded. Emerick returned to work. But he remembered the question that came to him that day in the CAT tube, and began searching for effective 3-D inspection software. He found a number of products, but none had solved the fundamental problem of forging an accurate, efficient, affordable link between 2-D and 3-D. Finally, Emerick came across a small, two-year-old North Carolina-based outfit called Geomagic.

Geomagic, amazingly, had solved the problem. The company's software provided the missing link between the polygon and NURBS phases of the digital shaping and imaging process; instead of the 1,295 dimensions of the cover being inspected individually, they could now be processed all at once, and automatically. A Square D production worker could readily accomplish what used to be a major effort for a skilled designer. The three-week inspection process could be shrunk to just two days.

Besides offering a potentially industry-changing product, the company paid extraordinary attention to detail. In a similar vein, the company was unfailingly a pleasure to work with. Geomagic's service reps listened closely to Emerick's concerns, all the intricate, industry-specific issues, and responded in an almost intuitive way. It was as if someone from Geomagic had ridden into the CAT tube with Emerick, and been visited by the same thoughts.

Emerick knew that the style of a company, especially a smaller one, usually reflected the personality of its CEO. Geomagic's chief was someone named Ping Fu. Russ Emerick thought that he must be an exceptionally intelligent and insightful man.

One afternoon in the early fall of 1984, Ping walked the beach at Del Mar, Calif. She had arrived on the West Coast by an almost whimsical route. At the University of New Mexico, Ping had heard a professor muse that Asian graduate students, for all their achievement, rarely seemed to connect with American culture. The best way for them to learn about America, the professor suggested, was to enter a university as an undergraduate: Live in a dorm, eat greasy pizza in the dining hall, play foosball in the student union. Largely because of this offhand advice, Ping left the University of New Mexico without finishing her degree and enrolled at the University of California-San Diego--an undergraduate, this time, in computer sciences. She had come to the beach for a long, head-clearing walk.