Professor, may we begin in the Latvia of your childhood? You are 8 years

old. Tell me something about your family, your parents, the circumstances of your childhood. Well, I was born in Latvia, and I'm 8 years old now.

Yes. I have been fortunate to be born in a prominent Latvian family. My father is the chief of staff of the Latvian army.

Very prominent family. He is also a graduate from the Russian military school from the time Latvia was under Russian influence, and if you wanted to join the military, it had to be the Russian military.

He served a short while in a Russian division and then entered the higher Russian academy, military academy.

Was it already Soviet Russia or was this before? This is Tsarist, and he graduated, I guess a colonel and a lieutenant with specialty in staff work.

Staff work. Does that mean managerial skills?

This is really the operation part. Understand. Assigned to the whole unit. This was 1918 when World War I broke out.

He had made a good career up until then, and then he was in the Russian army, which entered Germany.

The Russian campaign was total disaster. They used their railroad system so efficiently and

so fast that they managed to defeat two Russian armies, not divisions. These were armies.

So your father is fighting with the losers. My father is fighting with the losers. He gets captured by the Germans and spends several years as a German prisoner of war.

By the way, I said it was 1918. It was 1914 when the war broke out.

Understood. Because we don't have very much time, I want to get you born, so he's going to have to leave captivity and make his way back to Latvia. The thing I want to also inject here is that the German treatment of captured officers was very good, and so that was a time of education for him.

Before he really hadn't had very much high education. No. That really was kind of graduate school. When the war ended, prisoners were released.

He returned to Latvia, which in 1918 declared its independence, operated as a sovereign country.

He joined the Latvian army, which was fighting remnants of German and Russian units who were in Latvia.

For his service during the war, he was awarded a nice country estate called Lesten.

It was a lovely manor house, nicely maintained and nice park setting and with a farm attached to it.

We spent our winters in Riga going to school. I was attending French Lissé, as did my sister, who is two years old.

We spent winters in Riga and summers on the country estate, and that was just wonderful.

And I was usually thrown in the governess for a while for the summer to learn French and German.

There was no foreign language, I guess at that level.

In Latvia. Because we are really looking into the history of your mind, I wonder what kind of an educational emphasis there was when you were in that first school. Mostly the humanities, was there any science?

Well, it was a French Lissé. Sorry, I should have said French was a foreign language. And I was in the French Lissé because my father was a graduate from the Superyear at Colder Gear.

He and my mother spent two years in Paris. He was in the same class as Charles de Gaulle. So I have all the pictures.

Two great military figures. Yes, your father and Charles de Gaulle. Yes. So that also dates him. Yes, but also affects the life around you. What I begin to wonder, because it will be so important later in your life, is there an interest in science, either in your family or in the schools?

Is there an interest in technology at home? Is there anything that is not only the humanities? Well, my father very, very strongly believed in education.

And so then, even quite a young age, clearly I was planning to be a military officer. Natural. Yes, of course.

Well, anyway, so life was wonderful. Right. Unfortunately, roughly when I was 12 years old.

Okay. Very important age. Yes. All this changed. As we all know that Hitler wanted to attack Poland and to keep the Russians from getting involved on the Polish side.

They concluded the Ribbentrop Molotov, the Great Non-Aggression Pact, which divided Poland between Russia and Germany.

And the agreement included Hitler's agreement that Stalin has a free hand in the Baltic.

Yes. And Latvia is one of the three Baltic countries along the coast of the Baltic Sea.

Yes. So this was a disaster. This was a disaster. First, the Russians requested bases for air force and naval forces, for their naval forces.

And my father had the misfortune of being asked to be the liaison between the Russian forces and the Latvian government.

Right. They would assume maybe his sympathy toward Russia because he had been in a Russian military college. Yes, and served in the Russian army. Exactly. So they would have thought he would be a good bridge.

I don't know. Yeah, of course. How... They made this decision. This choice was made, but anyway, for him actually it was a bitter pill. When his job ended, he went in retirement and was arrested.

He went out to Lestene in winter in our state and was arrested. Yes. And we did not know what happened to him except that he had been sent to Moscow.

Well, we had no information whatsoever. For me, it was really a great help that if I were to have known what happened to my father...

Yes. It would have been tragic. Yes, devastating. Yeah. Only when the Soviet Union collapsed and the KGB files and so on became open did

we find the exact dates when he was tried and convicted and shortly after that executed in Moscow.

Which you did not know as a child. I didn't know only when the Soviet Union collapsed. Yes. So again, because I want to begin to develop your life, this tragic moment, your father disappears, the family... Does your education stop in the war?

No. So anyway, father is gone. Lestene is nationalized or whatever.

Yes.

Yes.

And so Lestene was gone. Otherwise, we knew that my mother and my sister... Yes. Not me, were on the list to be deported to Siberia. I was very offended.

That you were not on the list? Anyway, the war went very well in Poland, but the Russians then, shortly after they got their bases and so on, simply occupied.

I think all of the Soviet countries, but Latvia was occupied.

Schools went on. I learned about the glories of the Soviet Union. Yes. And learned some Russian. I think there were still some French lessons, but not very much.

The French Lusée became public school, I think, in 1949. Right. And we were thrown out of the big building where the institute, the Lusée, used to be. Would you see why I'm interested in whether you were getting any mathematics, any science at this time?

Because at least the Russian system had that in... Well, clearly, they didn't have much time to change things. Ah, of course. I must comment that in all my education, wherever I was, and it was in three different countries, the teachers were good.

Very good, actually.

And so that the teaching of mathematics was good. And my interest in history was broken.

Even though the times are so difficult and, in a way, tragic, I'm wondering when something like a mentor enters your life. When does somebody begin to discover your talents?

Is it this early, still in Latvia, that somebody, some teacher sees you as maybe a mathematician of the future or something like that? Or are you not exceptional at this stage? I don't think I was exceptional.

As a matter of fact, so much was going on that school... Was the least of it. Yeah. History was overwhelming.

Well, about a year later, Hitler attacks Germany. I'm sorry. He attacks the Soviet Union. And, you know, within a matter of weeks, Germans are in Riga.

We are under German occupation, just leaving Russian occupation. Clearly, if you were a Jewish, life was horrible.

But otherwise, Germans were far more rational than the Soviets.

In administrating, they let the Latvian administration run the country, as long as you delivered food, quotas, and so on. Right, of course.

And school continues, French, Russian are out, German is in, which delighted me because... You already had some German coming in then. Yes, yes. And also your mother and your sister are no longer threatened by going to Siberia.

Yes, but it's strange as I never were worried about it, which isn't clear to me. Fatalism. Yeah, right.

So now it's 1943, let us say, just to pick a period of the German occupation. Well, 1943, the war wasn't going terribly well for the Germans.

But if you jump to 1944, then the war isn't going well at all. And we are on our country estate, which was returned.

So less than hours, once for a year, Russian, now was returned and was being worked. And food rations, whatever was demanded, were delivered.

And food might have been short, everything was rationed, rationed cards. And it was wonderful to have Liston, which was a working farm.

Yes, yes. Well, anyway, so war doesn't go well. We start hearing artillery duels in Liston. A German division takes over our manor house.

And we are given, left a few rooms at the end, which are easily closed off.

The officers are very gallant and very respectful. You, my father, was a general. And so life is okay, but you know that you can hear artillery.

You couldn't hear small arms yet. Right. And anyway, the general, German general, invites my mother in and says,

Frau Generalin, things are not going well for us. I will supply you transportation to Ventspils, the only harbor which was still open.

And a ship will leave on such and such a day. So we all get packed in, in a last wagon, and we drive to the harbor.

The German driver, they should have used a Latvian who would know exactly how to get there.

Get lost, our ship leaves. Without you. Without us. Well, phone calls and so on.

There will be another ship a day or two later. Another ship arrives. Another ship arrives. You're on it. We get on the ship. And it's going to Germany, certainly. It's supposed to go to New Orleans because we had some people, sorry, no, sorry.

It's going to, sorry, German ship.

We had his lovely good friend, a Latvian born, a dancing party member, chemistry professor in Marburg.

When he visited us in Lestene, he said to my mother, if you ever are in trouble, come to Marburg.

Come to Marburg? It's a lovely university town. How old are you now? This is now 45? We are middle school. Middle school, okay. You're a part of middle school.

Yes. We go on a ship, land in Lansing, by train. By the way, that was well organized.

Where do you want to go? Marburg. Why everyone in Marburg? We have a friend there, yes, a distinguished professor, yes. Oh, yes. My mother had a recommendation letter from the command in general.

And we go by train through Berlin, which was really a total shock. It was devastated. Totally. Yes.

There weren't even streets sometimes, just a ramble kind of flattened down. And I was impressed how the chimneys were still standing in many houses, or one or two walls, but nothing else.

Anyway, we go through there, go to Marburg, had a one-room apartment, which the professor organized. And we get a permit to stay.

Many refugees were not given permission to stay. And a short while later, well, Christmas and all that passes.

And early in May, 1945, the Americans occupy, liberate, whatever your preference is.

Again, in the midst of this chaotic history, I still want to educate you. Are you placed in a good situation for education yet, or do you lose years?

Marburg is a university city, but schools were not yet open in Germany. But in a displaced person's school, a Latvian high school opens.

You go to a Latvian high school in Marburg? No, in Zetmold. But in Germany? In Germany. Yes. And very nice, but it's in the British occupation zone.

My mother is still in Marburg, so... You're separated. We're separated, and crossing the occupation zones is not easy. So there is Latvian school in Hanau.

I get in that school. I choose to give up Latin and Greek and have physics and chemistry.

Without guidance, this is your own impulse. Yes, that's my sister, who didn't think I could make it in Latin. So as a secondary consolation prize, she said go into physics and chemistry.

No, well, at that time, the atomic bomb and so on, physics was great. So at Marburg, I finished a Latvian high school, and I'm a physics student.

And you're qualified. I mean, you take it early enough so that you have a future in it. You can go to university in physics. Well, they admitted me, and I'm a physics student.

And it was an interesting time. Professors were good. These were the German professors that stayed, still had positions, or were these other professors who had come in?

No, no, these were German professors. They were still in place. Yes. And your German is excellent. Oh, by then? By then. So you are now studying physics in German, in Marburg.

Now again, I'm still looking for the emergence of the very, very good technology and scientist and mathematician. When does he show up? Do we discover him at university?

He knows him. You were confident? Yes. Whether I really had the reason to be. Oh, no, sometimes confidence is enough to push you.

So you know you... Anyway, so clearly we want to get out of Germany. Right. Germany was a sad place at that time. Right. Just when we left, they introduced the Wehrungsreform. And Germany really started picking up.

But we went to the United States again. We had a friend sponsor us. Before I let you go, I want to know, did you graduate? No, I... You didn't get your degree? No. No. I got my four diploma.

Okay. I went in and took the exams, which was early, because I was there only two and a half years. Okay. Counting semesters. So you had had certainly some university education. Yes. No degree, but it was time to leave.

And you had the opportunity to go to the United States. Yes. We leave. We have, again, ship trouble. We are on a nice, I don't know who built them, Kaiser or somebody, troopships. We have nice layered bunks.

Yes. And a big swarm hits, and the B deck of the ship cracks.

Well, I watched a very interesting play. You can see how the crack advances. And surely, we were not supposed to be there. A bunch of sailors and officers, and one just makes a big cross on the deck, a little

bit ahead of the crack. And they drill, and they drill a nice hole, and the crack goes around it. Finally, on the third try, the crack enters that, and you know, stops, because it now

can open and close, and as later was reported, this was touch and go.

Anyway, so we cannot continue very far. We have another ship stand by and go with us. We go into New York. In New York, by that time, there is an identical ship of ours, and we park across

them. And they just said, go to your bunks, go to your numbered bunks. We all basically walk over, and we go to New Orleans.

There we go on a train and go to Kansas City, which was the destination. This is where the Latvian friend lived? Yes. And what was his position in society? Another professor, or a businessman? In Latvia, he was an architect.

Oh, okay. And he was a young couple in, let's say, the very late 30s or so, and he was working in an architectural firm. So, not yet American success, but coming.

Yes, on the way, on the way. On the way. You know, I'm consumed by your education, so what happens to you as a mind? Okay, University of Kansas City gives me fellowship.

In physics? That's the problem. University of Kansas City is now University of Missouri at Kansas City.

They look at my studying book and conclude that I have a bachelor's degree. Now, I'm not sure how one does that in two and a half years, but they say, I'm here

as a fellowship. Finally, I recognize. Yeah, I recognize. Unfortunately, there is no graduate program in physics, but there is a good one in mathematics.

You will be happy in mathematics. Another accident in your life, really. If there had been a physics faculty, you would have stayed in physics probably. Oh, yes. No question. Absolutely. But you are forced now to specialize in mathematics.

Okay. A year later, I have a master's degree. In mathematics. In mathematics. And now comes a decision, what do I do now?

And I said, yeah, surely my father would say, get a PhD. And so I applied to a few schools. In Kansas City, I've worked as a chauffeur, just to chauffeur Dr. Haschinger's wife's

mother to church and so on. And I said, oh, I know how to drive, but I don't have a driver's license. Dr. Haschinger, former dean of the Kansas Medical School, said, don't worry about that.

Did I worry? No, I drove the lady. Without a license? Without a driver's license. Look, there, things like that, when I mentioned that to some American friends, they were

not terribly surprised. Anyway, so I have a master's degree.

And I applied to several schools, including Caltech. People said, apply to Caltech, apply to Caltech. Wasn't this a long shot? I mean, Caltech, it's the height.

They not only gave me a teaching assistantship and $90 to get there. I said, those people understand what they're doing. I applied also to the, you know, Lincoln University.

Lincoln, yeah. Anyway, which is well known, well reasonably known agricultural school. And why would you apply to that?

Ah, I'm glad that question occurred because our president had the degree from there. Yes. And since our, we were somewhat through my wife's, through marriage, related to the president.

So he came for Christmases and things like that. And I heard a lot about Lincoln, not Nebraska, whatever university.

But I thought the president went there. Wow. Don't tell me you really... Well, they admitted me. Yes, but was there a chance you would go there instead of Caltech? No.

If I wouldn't have been Caltech, I would have probably gone to University of Kansas. Okay. Respectable. So Caltech admits you in mathematics and that's the specialty you declare? What do they admit you in?

What graduate? Well, I said I wanted to get a PhD in mathematics or physics. Back to physics. They looked at my background and wisely decided that I knew more mathematics than physics.

So they directed you... They said, I don't know how they chose, but they said, you will be very happy as a mathematician. And they were right? They were right. Four years later, I had a PhD.

My first job was at Cornell. I'm not going to let you take your first job until you tell me what direction in mathematics did you go for your PhD. What were you choosing as your field within mathematics?

Oh, very interesting. My advisor was Dilworth, famous lattice theory guy, and he gave me a problem.

The embedding problem for partition lattices. Partitions for lattices show that every other finite lattice can be embedded, picked as a sub-lattice from the partitions.

And I can only say one thing. That was a bitch of a problem. And I smelled that pretty early.

That it's going to be tough slugging. Partitions are things where you divide a set in totally disjoint sets. And I looked and worked with this and finally said, what the hell?

Why don't allow at least one point to get there for them? Just out of poking around. And suddenly again, it's a lattice and the same embedding problem nobody has worked on.

Well, two things.

I solved the embedding problem for that. And then I realized what mathematical object insists that only one point between two of its sets.

Well, that's the geometry. If two points are together, it's a line. And so there I have an embedding theorem for the lattice of geometries.

And now it has a framework. And a few more theorems about lattices of geometries on Dilworth's set have it written up.

And that meant somebody typed and it's a CIN 24 or whatever page. Dissertation. But a brilliant solution. Totally my invention of the problem and the techniques to solve it.

So this looks like a promising career. And that to me really said that Caltech taught me how to do research.

Not by lecturing, not by just having it happen. And posing an impossible problem for you to solve. No, no, no. The partition embedding problem remained unsolved for several decades.

I kept reading physical or mathematical reviews, fearful that somebody will solve it within a year or two. So now I will let you graduate. For your graduate degree, your doctorate.

You have it after this remarkable thesis. So where do you go next? Well, it's very interesting. In many things, things just happen. What I had to take and so on.

You know, the Germans and the Russians meddled with the world. And I was trying to get an education. You need a career too.

Oh yeah. And I was going to have an academic career. No question. No question. You were going to the university permanently. And Professor Walker from Cornell just happened to visit Caltech.

Wilbur just happened to mention two students who packed their cars. I took my mother with me and we took off for Kansas City in the mathematics department as instructors.

Which is the first step on the ladder. But you're not there long. I spent there two days. Two days? Oh, sorry. Two years.

Two years. Two years. And go to Cornell. Have a great time there. What did they invite you to teach? We were the new troops.

They had converted calculus from big class to class of 20. And we got those two classes of 20 to teach calculus first year.

Second year was already more selective. And at that time Dilworth mentioned a manager from GE Research Lab who was looking for people to...

He really was looking for computer scientists, but he didn't know it. Would... His what? Would the term computer scientist even be common at this point?

No. No. So he wouldn't even have had the phrase really. He wouldn't have even had the phrase, I want a computer scientist.

Well, the unit he was given to manage, he named Information Studies Section. Interesting. And it was mostly information, but there was Shannon's information theory and the

success in World War II with radar and cryptography and all kinds of things. If you didn't look profoundly enough, didn't look hard enough, it looked like information.

But it was digital and it was computation. So he said, there's this guy. He's just what you're looking for. Why are you tempted?

You want a university career as a researcher. What are they offering you that lures you outside of academia? Well, I spent the summer at the GE Research Lab. That did it. That did it. Well, what were the conditions that appealed to you?

Well, I wrote a research paper during the summer there. It's not a profound thing. I did. But there were so many interesting problems. And we, you know, one could just feel that there are things which need to be formalized.

We're supposed to be the masters of abstraction. Well, computer science by then already started little blossoms coming up, came up.

And I accepted GMAT. Spent seven years. Is this the first year there in 1958 maybe?

Something like that? The late 50s, I'm just interested in just in terms of the history of knowledge where computers are. So anyway, it's the 50s. I would calculate it on my fingers.

Actually, I can look and see it was 58. Yeah. It was 58. And you'll be there seven years. And these are going to shape really your intellectual life and reputation forever.

Well, actually, our Turing Award contribution which had comes from that work. Dick Stearns was done at G.E. Rieser clients. So bring me to the point of that amazing insight which led to your award.

You were there for some years. Where is your curiosity taking you? Now? Yes. At General Electric. At General Electric, yes. Well, the work which we did, which was really exciting and so on.

Yes. You know there is a Turing machine. Which Turing defined and showed, which Godel already had in a sense, that any sufficiently complex mathematical system,

where you can do addition and multiplication and logical decisions,

will always have theorems which are true but not provable in that system. You define your system and I will write down a theorem which has no proof in it.

Very potent result. And Turing used the machine to show that this is the case. He basically showed that you cannot figure out whether a Turing machine will ever halt on any input or whether it will halt on some input.

There will be always some theorem which you cannot prove. And Dick Stearns, we sat at one point really concentrated on what Turing did, the Turing machine.

And in no time at all, we could prove all kinds of undecidability results.

And we started looking at how rugged is this model.

What happens if I give you more tapes? Yes. Nothing. What if I allow you to... I mean, nothing changes.

If I give you a Turing machine which runs around on a flat tape, probably a little bit faster, you can compute.

Faster? Okay. What if we change the machine in other ways? And we can always prove that roughly within a square of the time, which you could previously do, you can do it on the new model.

And so we said, well, so that's a good model. Let everybody tinker with it. They still will be roughly...

It's the same neighborhood it's been, and not only that, we could prove all kinds of lovely things, how much we can get these differences.

Most of them can be even further compressed if you just tinker with the programs, and

we boldly declared defined computational complexity of algorithms. What is it? It is a set of all algorithms which you can compute in a given bound, like n square.

That means that when the problem is n long, it will take you n square steps, so give me

a function and the class will be all the computations which can be done in this time. Small changes, no effect, those the machine can encode in the machine.

So basically it's a rugged and good model for complexity, and it gives you a definition.

So every algorithm you propose, you may not know what the time bound is, but you can prove some time bound, then you have at least that kind of information.

For example, I don't think we even have a final bound, how fast matrices can be multiplied.

N-cube is what a school child would give you, an algorithm, but it's less than that,

it's not cube needed. And so there are famous names attached who got smaller and smaller exponent and so on.

You publish very soon after your conclusions about this, about your work with the Turing machine and so forth. It's received as revolutionary, or at least groundbreaking. Yes, you can have two views.

Oh yes, it's diagonalization again.

Surely we had invented things, but now we have to have machines which run in a certain time to mimic whatever bound you want. And then you can prove that, if I give you a little bit more recomputation, you'll

get something else. Well, there are lots of interesting theorems there, but in his Turing Award lecture,

Clark says in his Turing lecture that once you read our paper, that you cannot, I don't

know exactly what, I mean, I haven't. No, no, but essentially that you can never think the same way. Yes. I think that's what he was celebrating in your insight.

So you create, do we say a field, a whole new direction by this? A field. A field, which you name. Yes. You call it computational complexity.

Yes. I think there's another school, and again I'm the innocent in this matter, but there's another school, either the same time or later, which is more likely called abstract computer complexity as opposed to what you were doing. Can you describe the difference? Manual bomb.

We have a model, a real one, and you can tinker with it and so on. Nobody writes Turing machine programs.

They write real programs, because I know there's always a compiler which will translate in the horrible language, but because programming a Turing machine to do something is really

implementing the algorithm, and that somehow the Turing machine was sitting around and

people have not realized, or not really what we said, look, this is a very stable model.

Intuitively satisfying properties. And every algorithm can be programmed on a Turing machine. What is Blum saying?

Yeah. Blum, under the influence of Raybin, Michael Raybin, who were that MIT group, was well knowledgeable in recursive function theory, really where Turing computability is the

essence, but clearly before a Turing machine was invented, such computable things were defined abstractly, and so Blum gives two very simple axioms.

What is a computational complexity measure? And what it is basically, I give you a Turing machine.

Well, what is it? It can be partial that it doesn't compute anything for certain, just run forever.

Yeah, so, you know, it's just like our model. Okay, it doesn't hold. Okay, then it either stops or runs forever.

That's in the model. And he gives these two axioms and then anything satisfies them is a complexity measure.

So, I'm not sure he says that this works for partial functions. Sorry, it's valid for partial functions.

He gives you, say, a Turing machine and says it will hold for all inputs. And he doesn't look at all of the machine, how long it works.

He just says it defines a function, and I give another function. You take a function, and I give you another function. No conditions are more computability, really, on this guy.

For any x I give you and any n I give you, you can test whether it has stopped in n operations.

You can do that here. So, if this guy converges, this does. And you can answer, well, if it really stops, you're now in partial functions.

So, that's a complexity measure. He gives you that function, that is what you are interested in, and they are related.

If this stops, so does this one. So, the two approaches to complexity, computer complexity, are really, they're compatible. Oh, yes.

These are not competing visions. Well, it's certainly computing in style. But the thing is, here you can invent all kinds of weird things.

And he, no, Blunt did some very clever things. Kind of weird things. So, not really applicable in specific use.

But you can just say, make this a Turing machine, and this time a Turing machine, whole thing.

Yes. And you go from us, sorry, you're right back where we are. Yes, yes, yes. Because you have such a rich career and we don't have very much time, I want to first ask you at this stage,

are you beginning to call yourself a computer scientist and not a mathematician? This is terminology, but it also marks moments in the evolution of the field. Well, I sure am living being a computer scientist.

Oh, but I mean at the point at the lab when you have come up with this insight, are you still calling yourself a mathematician or are you beginning to say I'm a computer theorist? I was a research mathematician. A research mathematician. That was my title. Another very important stage in your career, and that's why I'm using terminology as a transition,

is your invitation to come to Cornell after this extraordinary career, to come to Cornell and essentially create a department. No, no. No, okay, tell me. They had created it. They had, okay.

That's why I came, because they had a million dollars from Sloan Foundation to train computer scientists for the growing need in universities.

So Sloan was farsighted. Was this the first department so-called? No, no. Several universities. I would guess Carnegie Mellon maybe?

Carnegie, clearly MIT didn't have it called computer science, but it was electrical engineering, and that was computer science. But Cornell was, through Sloan, was prepared to call it a department of computer science.

They had decided that that's what it was going to be called. And they invited you. Yeah. And you decided to come. The same guy, Bob Walker, who... Initially got you interested in Cornell. Yeah.

And then sent you maybe on to GE, brought you back to Cornell. Yeah. Wow. And you hesitated, or, I mean, you were in a research paradise. Yes. He called me, and as I said, yours? We're starting a new computer science department.

We would like to talk to you. I said, okay. And Ellie and I were here a week or two later, I don't know. And you haven't left? Well, I'm in here at Cornell, visiting, and it looked so clean.

The math department was strongly for it. Physics didn't know what computer science was.

Yes. And why shouldn't there be telescope science? Because my assistant learned fourth round over the weekend. Yes. And he wrote horrible programs.

Right. Anyway... The university held to this. I mean, it wasn't a controversial decision to establish this department. I don't know what kind of fights were there. But that's how you came. But mathematics, operations research were all for it, strongly.

Dean Schultz, a very clever dean, said, I have space for them.

They had space because they had just abolished technical drawing. And so Upson Hall... Became available.

Not all of it. But top floor became, with large classrooms, which we carved up quickly. You needed, for yourself, and this will conclude our discussion, but I think it's important to underscore, you needed for yourself a notion of what would advance the field

and what was just maybe a trick that could be demonstrated. Yes. Because it's sometimes a difference hard to see. Yes.

And basically, it seems to me that yours has been a career of looking at that, at the essence of the question. Is that fair to say, rather than the trick pony of it?

Well, you know, some very clever tricks in an operating system, I would accept if I would understand.

Well, as somebody said, assuming you design a four-term program, which is twice as fast as the fastest one available,

is that a thesis? Good question. What's the answer? Just by itself? No. But explanation why is it faster is a thesis.

Thank you very much.