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.
From Eric Allin Cornell
Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.
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.
It was there I met my future wife, Celeste Landry, although our lives took us separate ways for many years and we were not to marry until more than ten years later.
Six months after that, I left Taiwan, first for Hong Kong and then for mainland China, where I spent another three months studying still more Chinese and generally kicking around the country.
Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.
As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life's work was probably a mistake.
Conversely, I came to realize that being good at something is hardly a reason to avoid doing it.
There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.
With every passing year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives