Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank.

Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.