For a man who has spent most of his working life, toiling quietly in the groves of academe, John Lewis has an amazing story to tell. Lewis is a senior professor of mathematics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS), who has spent most of his career involved in basic research. It was the intervention of a senior civil servant which launched him on a track that lead to the formation of a commercial company. And the tale doesn't end here. Lewis then opted to take his research on to a further stage: he gathered another research team around him, applied for and was awarded funding to the tune of £5 million from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI).

Dr John Lewis is now principal investigator of an ICT project which will be based in DIT. Lewis made the transition from basic to applied research in the early 1990s, when the then secretary of the Department of Education, Noel Lindsay, made it clear that continued funding would be dependent on DIAS' demonstrating the relevance of its work.

The Institute was established by Eamon de Valera in 1940 to pursue basic research in Celtic studies, theoretical physics and cosmic physics. It had already been saved from closure due to the cutbacks of the late 1980s by the intervention of Ray McSharry, an admirer of De Valera.

Welsh-born Lewis came to the Institute from Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1972. Since then, he has also taught fourth-year maths students at TCD, where he holds an honorary professorship. His Irish connections began when he moved to Belfast with his family as a teenager. There, he attended first Inst (Royal Belfast Academical Institution), and then Queen's University.

Lewis was galvanised by the Lindsay visit to DIAS. "That's when I began the activity in the school of theoretical physics to find an area in which the skills I had developed in basic research could be applied," he recalls. "This was pre-Internet. At that time, they were developing big computers - called switches - for broadband networks. The switches stored transmitted data in queues, read the addresses and routed it, accordingly. I hit on studying problems associated with queueing and it turned out that the maths I had developed for my particular interest - in statistical mechanics - was just what was needed for tackling these problems. Instead of making elaborate models of tele-traffic on broadband and calculating the rate function, I decided to measure it."

In 1993, Lewis obtained a Forbairt grant, recruited two graduate students and by the end of the year had proved that it was possible to measure the rate function. A paper, delivered at Cambridge University, attracted the attention of the computer laboratory, there. The lab had been experimenting with switches and was keen to collaborate with Lewis's team. To get EU funding to further the research, however, they needed an industrial partner. Telia, the research arm of Swedish Telecom, was interested and in 1996, a joint application to the EU won funding for three years.

Halfway through the project, they realised that their work was likely to have a commercial value. It was at this stage, however, that the Microsoft Research Laboratory, which had recently been established in Cambridge, tried to recruit Lewis and his graduate students (who by now were PhDs), offering lavish facilities and good salaries. Fortunately, Lewis managed to persuade the Department of Education to fund an assistant professorship, which was divided between the two researchers. Half their time was spent on basic research, the rest on contract research.

By 1999, the project had attracted the attention of a venture capitalist and was established as a private company - Measure Technology Ireland (MTI). When, last year, Science Foundation Ireland launched its £500 million research programme and invited researchers in ICT and biotechnology to apply for funding, Lewis contacted a former student - Dr Chris King, professor of maths at Boston's North Eastern University, and suggested he apply. King demurred, but when Dr Brendan Goldsmith, president of DIT, invited Lewis to submit a proposal and base the project in the DIT, he agreed to join the team. King, who is a graduate of TCD, has worked as a consultant with Microsoft and has been the coinventor of two Microsoft patents relating to the mathematics of telecommunications routing tables. UCD maths lecturer Dr Wayne Sullivan has also been recruited to the team. Sullivan wrote the code of the first version of TeX (a mathematical typesetting programme) to be used on a PC.

"The idea of the project," Lewis explains, "is to use mathematics in the way we did in the earlier project - in telecommunications, as before, but also in multi-media computer operating systems and in parallel processing computer systems. In all these areas, there are problems of allocating scarce resources. We will use the statistical properties of these systems to achieve the optimal utilisation of resources. Our aim is to produce a research group which will have an international reputation and train graduates in research in the area." Lewis is currently recruiting PhD students for the new endeavour. "We are looking for a small number of people to start PhDs," he says. Mathematicians, computer scientists or theoretical physicists who are strong in maths will fit the bill. Lewis is confident that he will be able to develop a postgraduate school at the DIT.

Despite his success in applied research, Lewis is adamant that basic research is central. It was his basic research on the large deviation theory, which he started in 1985, that ultimately lead to the establishment of MTI. Nonetheless, applied research has its thrills. "I get huge satisfaction from pure maths, but I find it enormously satisfying to see some abstract maths idea having an application. I will be thrilled if the company develops a successful product which embodies the original idea," he says.

FactfileCardiff High School, Wales; Inst, Belfast; QUB: BSc (maths 1952) PhD (applied maths 1955).

Family:

married to Maureen McEntee, an organic chemist. Four children: Catriona, a software consultant in New Zealand; Michael, a quantity surveyor; Roisin, an artist and Ciaran, a barrister. Five grandchildren.

Interests:

wine and reading - particularly biographies.

Holidays:

wine tours.

Current reading:

Diderot at the Hermitage by Malcom Bradbury.