Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.

My freshman year of high school I joined the chess and math clubs.

My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.

Most of my teachers probably found I made less trouble if they let me read.

Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.

Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.