As a 10-year-old, Pam Boehm sometimes sat in on her older sister’s engineering classes at the University of Notre Dame. Not the usual activity for a kid, but the experience introduced her to a discipline that would shape her life. “It’s not that I really had any idea what was happening in the classes, but the math was always exciting,” she says. After her father died unexpectedly, her grandfather stepped in as another big influence. Much of the rest of her childhood was spent following her “Mr.