Moral: Pay Attention in Math Class

Shortly before taking office in August 1985, Bolivian President Victor Paz Estenssoro asked Juan Cariaga '70 and five other men to develop in secrecy a plan to fight a 24,000-percent inflation rate left by the previous administration. The team had a deadline of 20 days. Cariaga, then head of the La Paz office of the Banco de Santa Cruz and president of the Bolivian Academy of Economic Sciences, was charged with forecasting the economic impact of the proposals they analyzed.

He performed the work on a Commodore 64 computer he had bought the previous year in the United States. Not knowing that the software already existed, he did all of the macroeconomic analysis with programs he devised himself, relying on math textbooks he had used 20 years before in classes with Professor John Kemeny. "Kemeny invented the BASIC program, and all the work I was doing in writing the computer models for our economic program made me realize how much he had accomplished," Cariaga said recently.

The plan, incidentally, was completed by the deadline. —T.B.