Brush up your Maths!

Penny Herscher

"What is the point of studying Maths?" some of us wondered in our school days.

Penny Herscher (O'Nians c.138) has the answer. She read Maths at King's College, Cambridge and now, in California, she is the high-powered Vice-President and General Manager for design and functional verification at Cadence, the world's leading supplier of electronic design technologies.

Penny believes that her Maths background is vital for the strategic planning necessary in high-level management - "The way to think through a problem - break it down - but never lose sight of the end - lies in mathematical skills". She adds that "a strong sense of integrity and ethics ingrained at a very young age" has also been a key to her success.

She comes from a scientific background. Both her parents are engineers and her grandmother, a Cambridge academic, was one of the original researchers into the effects of Vitamin C. After Cambridge Penny worked for Texas Instruments in Bedford, but finding opportunities for women limited in this country, went with her husband, Bret (also a mathematician and an engineer) to California.

There she eventually became the Chairman and Chief Executive of Simplex - an electronics design company - which she took from its start-up to the point where in 2001, it was sold to Cadence for $300 million.

She now travels extensively - worldwide, as well as within the USA - but also manages to bring up two children, visits schools to encourage girls to seize the opportunities in the world now open to them, and is involved with several charities for the underprivileged.