My Three Years at Tufts University.

After High School, in 1970 I went to Tufts University. I had a scholarship at Tufts that provided free tuition.I had a very memorable social life at Turfs -- in those days the parties never ended. (Randy Roos from my class at Wellesley High School was my roommate for one year; he was and still is an incredible legendary Boston-area jazz musician, and is now faculty at Berklee School of Music.)

Maybe as a result of all the late night parties, I did not actually attend any class lectures at all while at Tufts. Instead, I was enrolled in the Unified Science Study Program (USSP), an independent study program funded by the Sloan Foundation that allowed me to get credit for courses simply by doing the class homework and taking finals. I was mentored by a number of Tufts Professors (Dr Euler,Chair of EE and James C. Frauentha of ME), so I got to understand the academic world from their perspective and started then a habit of doing my own research projects in many diverse areas. I was still enthused about using a computer for anything and everything, but my projects became more technical and mathematical. My projects as a Tufts undergraduate included software for the design and simulation of coherent optics and computer-generated holographs, to engineer structures (wrote software for structural analysis of a geodesic dome and it’s enclosing fabric tensile structure under wind stresses), and simulation of neural systems (modeling the alpha wave of the human brain using stochastic partial differential equations). I also used Tufts computers to make computer art using mathematical curves and a short computer-animated movie, made using a graphics display with a computer controlled color wheel filmed using War II step-motor camera that ran overnight, The USSP program also provided funding for me to purchase equipment for my projects (the purchases where then the property of Tufts), and under this program I obtained equipment to set up two laboratories (an optics lab for computer made holography and a computer graphics lab for making computer movies) that I set up and used while doing projects on those topics. But, quite correctly, they refused to pay for the materials for a geodesic dome that I designed on a computer, saying that they had done enough and they would not pay for my house. So I constructed a geodesic dome at my cost and set it up one winter on the Florida Keys. (One of my friends that aided me on that project, Glenn R. Bell, later designed the geodesic dome centerpiece spaceship earth at the Disney Epcot center and became CEO of a top structural engineering firm Simpson Gumpertz & Heger.) I graduated Tufts in three years and for some reason they gave me a magna cum laude even though I don’t recall ever actually sitting in even a single course lecture at Tufts. But these highly stimulating experiences with research projects at Tufts gave me a life-long passion to do interdisciplinary research in diverse disciplines.

Just after my first year at Tufts, I hitched out west to California and British Columbia for a couple of months, and I learnt a lot about the real world and its people. I met and traveled with some really amazing people on those travels. I also had wonderful adventures on that trip. For example, on my westward hitch through Oregon, I saw the high peak of Mount Hood in the distance, so I got out and hitched to its base, climbed the peak on that afternoon and evening. I ascended to the volcanic peak’s caldaria just below the summit and camped there late that night. Unable to sleep due to the cold, I watched in the late hours of that night a storm of shooting stars that always occurs on August 11 and is quite striking at high altitude. In the morning, at dawn, I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time in my life, and then glissaded (a mountaineering technique that involves a controlled slide using an ice axe or stout stick) down the mountain’s glacier to the lower slopes of that mountain. That date is still memorable to me, since it also is my wife Jane’s birth date.(For details, see also “Memories of Evening Shooting Stars and a Pacific Dawn” )

In the spring of 1973, on my final term at Tufts, I took a course in winter survival where I met Jane Anderson, now my wife. We had a class camping trip to the Kancamagus wilderness in New Hampshire where it got down to –24 degrees F. I did not see Jane again until a month later, when I was playing my flute in the late evening in one of the student dorm stairwells at Tufts and Jane came up that stairwell. Things went from there. Outside of a short break, we have lived together since then, and Jane has been the center of my emotional life.