My pen name is Doc Ngu. "Doc" is because I have a doctoral degree in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. "Ngu" is because my last name is Nguyễn. And no, I am not related to your friend with the same surname: About 40% of Vietnamese have the Nguyễn surname. Out of college, I joined a division of AT&T Bell Laboratories in Skokie, Illinois, and was given the username "ngu" because Bell Labs abbreviated everything they could. I liked the "ngu" moniker right away because "ngu" means "idiot" in Vietnamese. "Doc Ngu" is a teeter-totter between the smart and the dumb. The Frog-In-The-Well series consists of books offering solutions that take a different approach to seemingly intractable issues. Being "a frog sitting in the bottom of a well" is a Vietnamese idiom to denote a person who knows nothing besides his small little world but keeps croaking loudly. Experts try to solve these intractable issues but the issues remain - why not try a path not taken? Once in a while, people ask me about one of my books; I tell them it either has a genius idea or the dumbest idea ever. You decide.Visit words.docngu.net for my current and upcoming books.
