My Time as Faculty at Harvard University.

In 1979, Harvard University hired me to be faculty in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, initially as an Assistant Professor. Harvard had a habit of not giving tenure to any junior faculty, which I was quite aware of, but I still went. I wrote papers on all sorts of topics in theoretical computer science in those days: program optimization, the complexity of games, modal logics for reasoning about programs, robotic motion planning, randomized algorithms, parallel algorithms, data compression, and algorithms in computational topology and geometry, algebra, graphs, groups, number theory, etc. At that time period I worked on parallel algebraic algorithms with Victor Pan at CUNY. I also worked on parallel sorting with Leslie Valiant at my department at Harvard University. As junior faculty at Harvard I supervised my first PhD students, Paul Spirakis and Sanguthevar Rajasekaran.

For most of those years I lived in another cooperative house in Medford MA –a wonderful, albeit slightly run down, historic mansion. Jane moved in there with me. In 1985, Jane and I got married. At that time we purchased a wonderful small house (brick English country style) in Belmont MA which we were very fond of, and only finally sold in 1999.

Gary Miller had moved to MIT during this time, and he his wife lived in Belmont, near our house. We again continued doing lots of outdoors activities together, which now included windsurfing, in addition to cross country and telemark skiing in the White Mountains. I wrote a series of papers with Gary on parallel computation, using terminology taken from raking leaves. Gary is now at CMU. He has a small airplane, and now and then his family meets us at the NC Blue Ridge mountains or seashore.

In 1983, Harvard promoted me to Associate Professor, but I did not get tenure there. I was (and still am) very good friends with the faculty there, and it was a very productive period for me, so I still feel it was still a good thing to have been there.