ABSTRACT
At the early age of 15, I graduated from Townsend Harris high school in New York and made the daring decision to study mathematics at the City College of New York (CCNY) during the depression, rather than some practical subject like accounting. The Mathematics faculty of CCNY was of mixed quality, but the mathematics majors were exceptionally good. Years later, one of the graduate students in statistics at Stanford found a copy of the 1939 yearbook with a picture of the Math Club. He posted it with a sign “Know your Faculty.” At CCNY we had an excellent training in undergraduate mathematics, but since there was no graduate program, there was no opportunity to take courses in the advanced subjects of modern research. I was too immature to understand whether my innocent attempts to do original research were meaningful or not. This gave me an appetite for applied research where successfully confronting a real problem that was not trivial had to be useful.
