Most of my teachers probably found I made less trouble if they let me read.

The postdoc explained to me how to distinguish different sorts of particles on the basis of the amounts of energy they deposited in various sorts of detectors, spark chambers, calorimeters, what have you.

My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.

After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.

My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.

My freshman year of high school I joined the chess and math clubs.

I was born in Palo Alto, California in 1961.