Interdisciplinary Meandering in Science

I was a graduate student in mathematics at Princeton immediately following World War II, 1945–1947. In those days, with veterans of the war inundating universities, there was no option but to earn a Ph.D. within two years. My thesis research was in functional analysis, an area of abstract mathematics. My mentor was Professor S. Bochner, a distinguished contributor to harmonic analysis. My classmates included Richard Bellman (who later nurtured the method of dynamic programming), Kai Lai Chung (of Markov chain lore), Ted Harris (who developed broadly branching stochastic processes and their applications), Gil Hunt (who set the foundations of strong Markov processes, now commonly called Hunt processes), and Paul Meier (an applied statistician, known as the pioneer of the nonparametric Kaplan-Meier test). When I completed my degree in 1947, Professor S. Lefschetz, chairman of the Princeton mathematics department, selected me for the job of becoming the first Cal Tech Bateman Fellow. I was the youngest Ph.D. that year and did as I was told, although secretly I was happy to go to California. So, in September 1947, I got married and moved to Cal Tech. I labored that first year on mathematical problems of Banach spaces (e.g., bases in Banach spaces, normed rings), continuing my abstract mathematical education. During 1948, economic inflation was rampant in the country and I needed a second job. Henri Bohnenblust, chairman of the Cal Tech mathematics department, arranged a consulting job for me at the RAND Corporation. RAND at that time was sponsored by the Air Force and was engaged in matters of strategic planning for the cold war.