My Life as a Quant Read Online Free PDF Page A

upper Manhattan tilted me towards depression. The cramped Formica-filled rooms in International House, a graduate student dormitory established by the Rockefeller Foundation on the far reaches of New York’s Upper West Side, bore little resemblance to the spacious-looking illustrations in the brochure they had sent to me in South Africa. The sickly green-and-white walls in the corridors and the guards at the back entrance added to the prison sensibility. It took several months before habit obscured all of this ugliness. “I. House,” as we all called it, was actually a very good place for foreigners.
    A few hours after stepping off the airplane, I descended into a state of acute loneliness. It must have had something to do with the sudden perception of distance and time; I had been away from home many times before, but never this far, and never for so undetermined a period. For weeks, verging on months, I walked around with a lump in my throat that threatened to overwhelm me. This welling-up sensation took a long time to pass, and when it finally did, I missed the painful intensity that the sadness and longing had brought to my existence. A few years later I read Young Törless by Robert Musil, and recognized the adolescent protagonist’s piercing and yet delectable unhappiness. The echoes of that first loneliness never totally faded away. Ever since, whenever I’ve had to start out in a new city alone, I feel again the resonances of those desolate days, at least for a short time.
    I spoke to almost no one during those first few weeks in I. House, which was virtually empty in the quiet lull before classes began. Ever cautious, I had arrived three weeks early, compulsively planning to settle down and get acclimated before starting my PhD program in physics. Instead, I felt isolated from everyone I had ever known. It is almost impossible today to be as cut off from any place in the world as I was from Cape Town during that first year in New York. There were almost no telephones in I. House—one extension in a badly soundproofed booth in the corridor served a floor of fifty people. Phone calls to South Africa were expensive and had to be booked in advance through an operator. I never called home; instead, I wrote letters to family and friends several times a week. Finally, mercifully, my first semester at graduate school started.
    A blind but avid desire for success in physics spurred me to leave Cape Town; simple chance brought me to Columbia. I had entered the University of Cape Town four years earlier at the age of 16. We were educated in the British style: You had to choose your major area—science, arts, medicine, or commerce—before you began your studies. I chose the natural sciences. In my freshman year I took four separate year-long courses in Physics, Pure Maths, Applied Maths, and Chemistry. There was not much choice of subtopics; you studied everything they chose to teach and then received a grade based on the grand final exam at the end of each year. By my final year I had decided on a joint major in Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics. Foolishly, the school had permitted me to study only theoretical physics from my second undergraduate year onwards, and so I emerged with no experimental skills. It was a premature specialization that no good American university would have tolerated.
    In late 1965 I suddenly noticed that the more ambitious students in my class were planning to apply to graduate schools abroad. Serendipitously, I stumbled on a path to the United States through a bad case of acne. By coincidence, my sister, a clinical psychologist, had helped my dermatologist’s young nephew successfully overcome “poor concentration” ten years earlier. The dermatologist took a benevolent interest in me, and encouraged me to apply to study physics abroad. I took his advice without really understanding what I was embarking on, and began to apply for scholarships to