Mathematics major has been busy burning curtains, not bridges

Paul Young is a mathematics major in the College of Arts and Sciences from Clinton, N.Y., who runs as software business on the side. Using a laptop with a wireless connection he can work in Collegetown as easily as at home. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By Roger Segelken

Don't call Paul Young with job offers. He has one already, in a company he started at Cornell.

But Young wouldn't mind hearing from potential clients for his offshore software development company with a Moscow address and a three-part business plan: To provide cost-effective solutions to customers in need of systems software, Web applications and database architecture; to provide good jobs to Russian programmers; and to help develop Russia's infrastructure.

Young's cyber odyssey -- from hometown Clinton, to Ithaca, then to Moscow and back to Ithaca -- took a detour to Rochester Institute of Technology, where he had enrolled in computer science. Now 23, Young recalls writing software for pay as a high schooler, then asking himself, as a freshman: "Why am I paying to learn something I know how to do?"

So he dropped out of college, worked around as a software engineer, but kept hearing good things about Ithaca. With his yen for hiking, winter camping and whitewater kayaking, the natural environment here was ideal. Quality of life and jobs were good, and "I had the idea," Young said, "of going back to school some day."

Which he did in 2000, following "a passion I've had since elementary school," he said. At Cornell, faculty members recognized Young's talent for mathematics and engaged him in undergraduate research. Working with R. Keith Dennis, professor of mathematics, he developed a proof for a problem that had gone unresolved since it was first raised in the 1970s.

Young also wrote tutorials for 400-level math courses, to help other students solve computationally intense problems. It was a National Science Foundation-supported program, called Math in Moscow, in the fall 2002 semester that took Young back to a country he had fallen in love with as a high school exchange student. Three years of Russian at Cornell gave him fluency in the language and a Moscow State University student he met, Sergei Yakovlev, introduced him to a willing labor pool of software engineers.

The two became business partners in Burning Curtain. The name, of course, refers to the Iron Curtain, which had fallen before the current, economically depressed times in Russia. Young says he finds Russians to be "simultaneously skeptical and optimistic," and hopes the new company will give some reason for the latter outlook.

In Ithaca for now, Young's next task is finding more clients for Burning Curtain. He'll do "cold calling" if necessary, but prefers to do networking, the old fashioned way. Through people. And people who know people.