Meet Nvidia's Canadian secret weapon

financialpost.com:

Sanja Fidler can’t remember exactly what illness kept her home from school for several months as a child, but she remembers the result: upon her return to class after a lengthy absence, she decided, in her little girl heart of hearts, that she did not like math.

This was not a position her mother Soca (pronounced Socha), who was an English teacher in the family’s hometown of Ljubljana, Slovenia, could tolerate, and so began a matriarchal counteroffensive aimed at wooing young Sanja back to the world of numbers by sitting down with the 10-year-old and solving puzzles together.

“Those riddles really got a hold of me,” Fidler said.

Did they ever. The girl who hated math became someone who began bringing her math books on family beach holidays. Other beachgoers lounged on towels and presumably buried their noses in novels, but the self-described math “nerd” solved nerdy math problems, and made a declaration at the grand old age of 12 that she would be studying the subject at university.

That is what Fidler was doing at the University of Ljubljana, circa 2000, when she attended a talk by a visiting professor on computer vision. This was the early days of artificial-intelligence research, when the field was confined to the far reaches of computer science departments at universities and the outer boroughs of geekdom.

Early computer-vision pioneers took visual problems and translated them into math to solve. The young, Slovenian math nerd was mesmerized by the prospects of such technology, so much so that by the time the talk ended, Fidler knew she had found her calling.

“It was love at first sight,” she said. “The fact that you could have something in mathematical form, but then see the results, something that human eyes could