The name of the company’s former headquarters building is being changed from the MCC building to the West Pickle Research building. It’s at 3525 W. Braker Lane, across MoPac Boulevard from the main Pickle Research Campus.

The new name reflects the building’s ownership by The University of Texas at Austin and its connection to the Pickle Campus.

The Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp., known as MCC, was formed in the early 1980s as a response to the rise of Japanese computer companies.

The idea was to combine the expertise of American computer companies in cooperative research. The competition came when companies made their own products from the research results.

Austin won a nationwide competition to be the home of MCC, putting Austin on the technology map. The university played a big role in landing MCC, donating the land on which the building was constructed.

It was a heady time in Austin. Technology companies such as IBM Corp. and Texas Instruments set up facilities in Austin, joining a handful of homegrown tech-related firms.

But MCC’s arrival thrust the city into the upper tier of technology cities and garnered attention in the national and international press.

I came to Austin in 1983 shortly after MCC did. Covering MCC and the emerging technology economy for the Austin Business Journal was a fascinating job.

Then a few years later, using their MCC experience, city, university, business and state leaders repeated their economic development feat landing the Sematech semiconductor research consortium. It still exists on land owned by the university in southeast Austin.

The MCC, uh, WPR building, is still the site of technology development. Tenants include the Austin Technology Incubator and its Clean Energy Incubator; the Office of Technology Commercialization; the Center for Space Research; the Center for Agile Technology; and the Institute for Advanced Technology.

The signs eventually will say “WPR,” but I’ll always see MCC.

Michael Starbird

“I was brought up in southern California and my father taught mathematics, physics and astronomy at a community college and he would bring mathematical and physics problems to the dinner table,” he said. “My brother and I talked about them.

“Mathematics was just a part of daily life. In fact, I often look back on that experience and realize how unusual and significant it was. That it made mathematics something that wasn’t confined to a classroom and it wasn’t something you thought about just in the confines of school. But instead it was something that was part of your regular existence. My brother also has a Ph.D. in mathematics, from Berkeley.”

That math is “part of your regular existence” has been a theme of Starbird’s career.

In classes, books and lectures Starbird tries to demystify math. And it’s not just the basics. He wants people to understand the big ideas of math.

Starbird came to that conclusion while developing a class for Plan II students.

“I realized that what we should be doing,” he said, “is taking great ideas of mathematics and making them accessible to these students just as they see the greatest philosophy and they read the greatest literature and they hear the greatest music. They should be exposed to the greatest mathematics not just the first few steps of a ladder they will never climb, which is the typical philosophy of mathematics instruction.”

He’s written two books in that vein with Edward Burger, a mathematics professor at Williams College. They are “The Heart of Mathematics: An invitation to effective thinking” and “Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz: Making Light of Weighty Ideas.”

And see Starbird’s Take Five video and his Hot Science, Cool Talks lecture.

They focus on four University of Texas at Austin researchers who made significant discoveries and brought new understanding to long-standing questions in their fields.

They are Hermann J. Muller, Linda Schele, Esmond Snell and Americo Paredes.

The poster with this post is about Schele, who studied the Mayan civilization of Central America.

Take a walk though the Main Building to get the full effect of it and the other posters. Tillie Policastro and David Holston from the university’s Design Center did the layout and design.