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.

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

I was born in Palo Alto, California in 1961.

Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.

As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life's work was probably a mistake.

Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.

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.