My Life as a Quant Read Online Free PDF Page B

myself would have laughed quite disbelievingly, at age 16, 21, or 34, if someone had told me that I would be working at an investment bank at age 40.
    At registration on the first day of my first semester at Columbia, my assigned course advisor was Professor Henry Foley, himself a near-famous physicist who had been part of a classic 1940s experiment that verified Feynman’s Nobel Prize-winning theory of electrons. Foley, a charmingly cynical man, quizzed me briefly about my knowledge of atomic physics and discovered how little I had learned in Cape Town about the details of the spin-orbit interactions of electrons. Then he commanded me to register for G4015, the introductory Columbia graduate course in atomic physics and quantum mechanics. 2 Most physics majors at American schools had taken the equivalent subject in their junior or senior year of college, so here I was starting off a year or more behind the rest of the pack. It was a disheartening setback, the beginning of three long, tedious, and unexpected years of coursework and examinations at a time when I had expected to soon embark on original research.
    Foley was right, though—I didn’t know enough. In Cape Town in the early 1960s we had learned a shallow rudimentary version of modern physics and quantum mechanics. The physics professors there, for the most part, seemed uncomfortable with everything that had developed after 1930. Their attitude—that you were lucky if you ever got to really understand quantum mechanics—stayed with me a long time. Physics in the United States was much more professional, hard-nosed, and businesslike. Columbia’s physics department, I saw over and over again, didn’t think of modern physics as something esoterically advanced and difficult, to be revealed to you only when you crossed some threshold and finally became an initiate. They expected you simply to plunge right in.
    The one subject I had learned really well as an undergraduate was Applied Mathematics, a slower-moving subject easier to keep abreast of in distant, isolated South Africa. In Cape Town, the closed-book, year-end exams were fashioned after the famous Cambridge Tripos examination on which many of the British-educated faculty had been reared. Rapid, practical problem solving as well as memorization were heavily emphasized. Everything was done thoroughly. In each successive year we were taught progressively more advanced versions of classical mechanics and electromagnetic theory. I can still recite some of the indefinite integrals and Fourier transforms we had to learn by heart in order to take the final exams. 3
    The physics department I entered at Columbia in 1966 was legendary. The first thing that struck me was their direct connection to so many groundbreaking episodes of twentieth-century physics. The recipient of the first PhD degree ever awarded by the department, at the start of the century, had been R. A. Millikan. Later he received the Nobel Prize for his precise measurements of the invisible electron’s charge by ingeniously measuring the deflection of tiny oil drops carrying an unseen electron or two’s worth of static electricity.
    When I arrived, I. I. Rabi, the grand old man of physics in the United States after Oppenheimer’s death, was nearing the end of his reign over the Columbia department. He had received the Nobel Prize in 1944 for finding a method of measuring the magnetic properties of nuclei. Rabi was the intellectual father of a whole generation of American physicists, a respected government advisor, and one of the creators of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where Gell-Mann and Ne’eman’s Omega Minus particle was finally discovered. Now near retirement and seemingly garrulous, he struck me as more comic than genius. But I was young and a little arrogant then, and I had no conception of his wisdom and influence. Recently, I saw his old quote that “If you decide you don’t have to get