My parents were both physicians. The family physician type, not fancy researchers or anything like that. I picked up a sense of this idea that you do serve, you serve people actually. It’s an interesting thing. I don’t think they ever said that in any explicit term, but you could just see in terms of how — individual patients weren’t discussed — but just certain things were discussed, and you could see that that was important that you were doing something bigger than yourself. You were doing something for society. For some reason I was able to pick up on that, so I think that influenced. Especially my mother, who was a physician, who spent a lot of her hours in the office talking to her patients, and she would say talking was so important for many of her patients. Sometimes there weren’t even obvious things that a physician could do something about, but she said it meant a lot to them.

It so happened that we had a very good math teacher, who was a Communist. I remember having learned from him something that I never forget: the rule of nines. A simple point: you add up the numerals in a number, and if the original number was divisible by nine, then the sum of the figures also is. For instance, you take a number like 243. Two and four and three is nine. Therefore, 243 must be divisible by nine. Actually it is nine times 27. The rule is interesting because it’s so simple. What was really interesting to us ten-year-olds is that our math teacher proved it. The proof is not terribly difficult, but it was one of the first simple and not quite obvious mathematical proofs that I encountered.

My mother in that way I’ve described. My daddy taught me how much a man could do in dealing directly with a multiplicity of responsibilities. Outside my family, the main person, outside of my father, the main man who has had an influence on my life is Admiral Hyman Rickover. I was one of the two young officers in the program to build atomic submarines. There were two built: the Nautilus and the Sea Wolf. I was in charge of the crew that was helping to build the Sea Wolf and building the nuclear power plant that later became a prototype. Rickover was a man who demanded absolute excellence and total dedication from all those who worked under him. He demanded as much from himself. And so he set a standard of commitment and perfection in life that I had never experienced before. He really had a great impact on my life.

My father was my major teacher, disciplinarian. But my mother lent a lot to me and to my life, in that, when things weren’t going right, or when my father was too tough, I had the soft feel of my mother to help me, and she did. And she a lot of the times gave me confidence that I needed to overcome some of the things that happened that weren’t so pleasant.

I think it’s very different in what I do. Edison’s work was so much tinkering and trying it out and empirical testing. So much of my work is writing. I don’t know what you call the writing, it’s true that the actual inspiration, say for writing an essay, the outlining of it is probably a 15-minute to half-hour procedure, then you may spend about 20 hours writing it. But the writing isn’t perspiration in the same sense. It’s not inspiration, but it’s something in between. Any profession has a vast amount of tedium attached to it. There’s no sense not admitting it. If you’re passionate about it, tedium can be — not exactly a joy — but can be perfectly tolerable. The tedium of a pianist is 10 hours of practice a day or whatever, not all of which is inspirational. The tedium of an experimental scientist is calibrating the machines and doing it over and over again. The tedium of a paleontologist is poring over a microscope, or using a dental pick to chip away the sand grains from the fossil, or looking at the statistical figures in the columns of a computer printout. Every profession has massive tedium, that’s certainly true. You cannot be a successful professional (without it). But I think if you’re committed to it, as they say, it goes with the territory. It’s part of the work.