Abhishek was a Ph.D. student in Mathematics at Purdue University in Indianapolis in 1995. He was recruited by IBM Corporation, which needed to deepen its technical talent, to complete the development of a sophisticated Ambulatory Clinical Information System designed by IBM’s Watson Research. Abhishek soon became the lead developer on the project that later won the Davies Award in 1999 for the nation’s best EHR deployment at Kaiser Permanente. He eventually founded 314e to provide support for the IBM CIS to Kaiser Permanente. 314e subsequently assisted Kaiser Permanente with its data conversion and implementation of Epic within several Kaiser regions.
So what was Abhishek, a mathematician turned Silicon Valley entrepreneur, going to do for a company name? 3.14 is an abbreviation for the very special number Pi – the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The ubiquitous nature of π makes it one of the most widely known mathematical constants, both inside and outside the scientific community. ‘e’ is another symbol that shows up in unexpected places in life and mathematics as the base of the natural logarithm. Together they are perhaps the best known numbers that are represented by special symbols. But their product is shrouded in mystery. It is still an open question as to whether Pi * e is an algebraic or a transcendental number. What does this have to do with anything 314e does? Not much. 314e was thought to be a cool name and we share many of the same characteristics: precise, never ending, connected, productive and memorable.
March 14th has become a special day for us here at 314e. In fact we celebrate this special day at 12:14 PDT on 3/14 with a company party consisting of Pizza and Pi(e)!