At Harvard, I worked for some time as a researcher in a lab for computer graphics and spatial analysis, which is one of the birthplaces for what we do.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I went on to Harvard and got very interested in computers and studying the earth's landscape.
Soon after my degree, in 1958 I went to the United States to enlarge my experience and to familiarize myself with particle accelerators. I spent about one and a half years at Columbia University.
I was very fortunate to be elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is, in effect, a small research center where you are given three years to do whatever work you want.
I like to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists, people who can tell me something.
Then I started graduate school at UCLA. I got a part time research assistant job as a programmer on a project involving the use of one computer to measure the performance of another computer.
I used to work at NASA in Virginia. It was nothing glamorous; I was just tasked with making code compile for obscure projects, and I wasn't very good at it. Now I spend most of my time drawing pictures and looking at funny things on the Internet, which in retrospect is largely what I did at my old job, too.
I studied at Carnegie Mellon. I went there with a bunch of really, really talented kids.
When I was 28 years old, I found myself in Schenectady, New York, where I discovered that it was possible for some people to make a good living as physicists.
Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking.
At Berkeley I had my first encounter with real professional scientists.