I was raised in Brownsville, a Brooklyn immigrant working-class neighborhood. Brownsville’s then most prominent citizen was the head of  Murder Incorporated. My street friends and I hung out in a shady poolroom, on Livonia Avenue,  across the street from their headquarters. Amongst my street friends I had the nerdy reputation, of “being good with numbers”. This likely led to the resident poolroom bookmaker, a dapper Damon Runyonesk character named Nunnie,  to entice me to become an assistant bookie to him. Over the years, I  wondered why I turned him down, since I  would have elevated me in the eyes of my friends. Fortunately for me, I followed a PS 165 math teacher’s suggestion that I take the entrance examination for Brooklyn Tech. I did and passed. After, most of my spare time was spent with fellow Tech nerds working on math problems, and less on shooting pool. When I became captain of the Brooklyn Tech math team my neighborhood pals, disdainfully, referred to me as Webster. Had they been better educated, Newton would’ve been a better insult. In honor of my life-changing transformation the above background page shows the Grand auditorium of the Brooklyn Technical High School.

My run of good luck continued as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, JHU; and as a graduate student jointly at JHU and at the Courant Institute. My professors were brilliant, encouraging and of the highest character. Many were in our country due to the intellectual elevation of our society by Nazi Germany. JHU was then led by Detlev Bronk, who later established and led Rockefeller University, RU. When I joined RU Detlev, then retired and occupying an office down the hall from the Hartline lab, delighted in the fact that I had been a JHU student during his tenure there. (I was a first-generation American, Detlev’s ancestors settled on the banks of the Hudson River in the early 17th century, American royalty.) The connection with Rockefeller came after my reading of  Watson’s The Double Helix, and a lament to  Mark Kac that I was not participating in the heroic science of our time. Mark was a mathematics eminence, a Rockefeller professor, and one of nature’s nobleman. He introduced me to Keffer Hartline, Professor of Biophysics at RU, and a match was made. Bruce Knight was also part of the Lab, and we two wrote roughly 35 scientific papers together, some based on experiments we performed. This was perhaps the most exhilarating part of my scientific life. Keffer, a JHU graduate, won the Nobel Prize in 1967, jointly with George Wald, a Brooklyn Tech graduate.