Math 23a The Bizarre Academic Career of Paul Bamberg 1948

At Edith Baker Elementary School in Brookline, MA, five-year old Paul Bamberg insists on taking out books from the 4th-6th grade section of the school library. The principal persuades Brookline Town Meeting to override the rule against double promotions, and Paul becomes a second grader. 1952

At Highland Elementary School in Wheaton, MD, fifth grader Paul Bamberg asks his teacher for help in learning calculus. 1955

At Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, MD, Paul skips Algebra I, hands his Algebra II teacher his solutions to all the even-numbered problems in the textbook, and asks the teacher for help in learning calculus. 1956

At Forrest Sherman High School in Naples, Italy, Paul hands his geometry teacher his solutions to all the even-numbered problems in the textbook and asks for help in learning calculus. 1958

I The Navy transfers Paul’s dad to Newport, RI, and Paul enters a new high school in November of his senior year. He takes his first and only competitive math exam and comes out top in the state of Rhode Island.

I The chair of the science department encourages Paul to enter the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. His project, ”Analysis of Batting Performance in the Game of Baseball,” which uses linear regression to show that the sum of slugging percentage and on-base percentage correlates well with runs scored per game, wins him a trip to Washington, DC, where he meets students from Bronx Science and Stuyvesant who scored twice as well as he did on that competitive exam. 1959

Paul applies to Harvard and MIT, is admitted to both, and chooses Harvard. He becomes the most unpopular valedictorian in the history of Rogers High. 1959-60

Paul is interviewed by Prof. Garrett Birkhoff and accepted into Math 11, ”Honors Introductory Calculus.” 1960-61

I Paul enrolls in the brand-new course Math 55, taught by the brilliant young Prof. Shlomo Sternberg, who received both his PhD and his rabbinical degree at age 21.

I The median score on the Math 55b midterm exam is 12%. With a score of 60% on the Math 55b final exam, Paul earns an easy A, but there are classmates who do even better. Paul decides to stick with theoretical physics, where there is less competition.

I In the summer, Paul teaches himself FORTRAN on the IBM 704 computer which is housed in its own building at the National Bureau of Standards. 1961-62

I To meet the advanced humanities requirement for Gen Ed, Paul takes Linguistics 204, “Mathematical Linguistics,” and discovers that Markov processes, which he has been applying to baseball, are also used for modeling natural language.

I He is elected to the single-gender organization Phi Beta Kappa Alpha of Massachusetts but never meets anyone from the Radcliffe chapter, Iota of Massachusetts.

I He gets into trouble with the Senior Tutor of for signing out his girlfriend Cherry a few minutes after the 7 PM deadline. 1962-63

I John Finley, Professor of Classics and Master of Eliot House, whose goal is to produce more Rhodes Scholars than either Yale or Princeton, persuades Paul to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, and Paul is successful in the all-male competition.

I Master Finley is so pleased that he permits Paul and Cherry to play ping-pong in the Eliot House basement, which is ordinarily off-limits to women.

I Paul earns spending money by single-handedly grading the homework for more than 100 students in Physics 12, teaching lab and review sections, and inscribing homework solutions on mimeograph stencils. 1963-64

On arriving at Oxford, Paul discovers that by signing up to do a doctorate, he gets a heated office in the theoretical physics department. 1966

I Paul is now married to Cherry, who has become an Oxford graduate student. His dissertation is coming along nicely.

I Oxford gets its first computer, and Paul codes his Markov model for baseball in ALGOL60, using paper tape for input. When he adds the ninth batter to the lineup, he runs out of core memory. 1966-67

I Paul’s draft board informs him that as soon as he receives his doctorate, his student deferment will end and he must return to Newport for his pre-induction physical.

I To kill time, Paul adds another chapter to “Applications of SL(6,C) to Elementary Particle Physics,” and both Bambergs receive their degrees at the same ceremony.

I Paul applies for one job, Instructor in Physics at Harvard, and is hired at once, mainly on the strength of his reputation as a teaching assistant from his undergraduate days. 1967-68

I Prof. Wendell Furry, chairman of the physics department, persuades the draft board that Paul’s physics teaching is vital to the national defense effort, and Paul receives an occupational deferment.

I Experimental evidence for the existence of quarks shoots down Paul’s theory of non-compact groups, but his generating function and asymptotic expansion for generalized hypergeometric functions is immune to experimental refutation. 1968-69

I Paul is hired by the Extension School to teach classes for the nuclear Navy in Groton, CT to sailors who have watched filmed lectures while at sea.

I He works in the Summer School as head assistant for Prof. Albert Baez, who has recorded his premed physics lectures on open-reel audio tapes accompanied by slides.

I Albert’s daughter Joan sings folk songs at the class party. 1969-70

Paul is asked to take over Physics 181, “Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics,” the only standard physics course that he skipped as an undergraduate. He teaches himself the subject and records a splendid set of Baez-style audiotapes. He is promoted to Associate Professor. 1970-75

Paul accepts the invitation, traditionally ignored, for Harvard to send someone to the annual Physics Advanced Placement meeting. Once the exam committee discovers that he writes good multiple-choice questions, he is invited to join the exam-writing committee and eventually becomes its chair. For several years he writes most of the Physics AP exam questions. He then becomes Chief Reader and decides who gets a 5. 1975-1980

I Paul gets a new term appointment as Director of Science Instruction Development and starts collaborating with the math department.

I He becomes a leader of the self-paced instruction movement, which is headquartered at MIT, and creates a self-paced version of Physics 1 which he teaches to hundreds of premedical students annually in the College, the Summer School, and the Extension School.

I He collaborates with Prof Andrew Gleason to create a self-paced version of Math 1 and with Shlomo Sternberg to create four new math courses aimed at physicists. Paul and Shlomo publish A Course in Mathematics for Students of Physics. 1980

I The physics department, by a narrow margin, recommends Paul for tenure. A narrow margin is not good enough for the Dean and President, and Paul is out of a job.

I At a job fair he meets Jim Baker, who has recently wrote his PhD thesis on doing computer speech recognition using hidden Markov models. Jim offers Paul a job doing research at Exxon Office Systems.

I Dean of the offers Paul the new position of Director of Science, combined with Senior Lecturer on Physics.

I Paul accepts both job offers, each for 3/4 time. 1981

I Paul receives a phone call from Henry Leitner, the only computer instructor at Harvard Extension, who has just learned that as a Boston College faculty member he is no longer permitted to teach at Harvard.

I Paul instructs the editor to replace “Leitner” with “Bamberg” in the course catalog. Over the summer he teaches himself assembly language programming and data structures and teaches those subjects for the next fifteen years.

I The next year, Paul hires Henry Leitner as Assistant Director and together they launch an Extension School certificate program in computer science. 1982

I Paul implements Jim Baker’s algorithms in assembly language on a custom array processor and demonstrates real-time speech recognition.

I Exxon management concludes that research is no longer needed and slashes the research budget.

I Jim and Janet Baker quit and found Dragon Systems.

I Exxon Office Systems asks Paul to replace Jim as chairman of research. Paul and fellow particle physicist Bob Roth quit and join Dragon Systems.

I Paul and Bob implement small-vocabulary speech recognition on an Apple 2G, whose 8-bit microprocessor does not have a multiply instruction. The first public demonstration takes place in the . 1983

Baseball researcher Pete Palmer promulgates OPS, the sum of slugging percentage and on-base percentage, as the most appropriate measure of batting performance. He fails to search the Westinghouse STS archives and so neglects to cite Bamberg as a source. 1984-1992

I Dragon Systems becomes a major player in government-sponsored speech research and starts selling large-vocabulary dictation software that runs on personal computers. The world cannot figure out how Paul and Bob can do this until Paul explains his ”phoneme in context” approach at a speech conference in Edinburgh.

I The new AP computer science curriculum is announced. Within months, Paul and a colleague develop a new summer school course, CSCI S-111, which still exists, to cover every topic in the curriculum. Thirty high school math teachers, who have all been told that in the fall they will be teaching AP computer science, enroll. 1993 or so

Harvard’s Division of Applied Sciences has an unexpected resignation from its computer science faculty. The dean, also a physicist, invites Paul to teach CS 124, ”Algorithms and Data Structures,” in addition to Physics 1. 1995-1999

I Business is booming at Dragon Systems. Paul is V.P. of Research, leading a team of forty that is trying to bring commercial continuous speech recognition to market ahead of IBM. He becomes a member of the Dragon board of directors and retires from Harvard.

I Dragon beats IBM to market by a few months. Paul is promoted to Dragon Fellow and can again do research instead of management.

I Dragon tries to do an IPO, but the investment bankers call it off at the last minute. 2000-2001

I Dragon Systems is acquired, in an all-stock deal valued at nearly $600 million, by Belgian firm Lernout and Hauspie. Paul is briefly a paper multimillionaire but is forbidden to sell most of his stock.

I A Wall Street Journal reporter discovers what Dragon’s investment bankers Goldman Sacks did not: that L&H was founded on financial fraud. L&H goes bankrupt. Paul quits.

I Former physics student and CA Danny Goroff, now in the math department at Harvard, invites Paul to apply for a position. With a month Paul has his old academic rank back, but now he is Senior Lecturer on Mathematics. In the middle of the fall term he adds a new spring-term freshman seminar to the catalog and starts teaching the history of the computation of pi. 2001-2010

I Paul and John Boller create Math 152, which uses the same format as the freshman seminar. Students love it.

I Paul starts teaching probability, Math 191. It starts stealing students from Stat 110. Faced with competition, the statistics department hires Joe Blitzstein.

I Paul takes over Math 23. 2010 - 2016

I Paul opens up Math 23 to the Extension School and hires Kate Penner, his most successful student from the first Extension offering, as head CA.

I Prof. Harry Lewis goes on sabbatical, No one in SEAS wants to teach CS 20 in the “flipped classroom” style. Paul moves over from the math department to fill in.

I After years of trying to find someone who will offer a mathematically respectable statistics course in the Extension School, Paul takes the easy way out. He teaches himself R and statistics and offers Math E-156, “Mathematical Foundations of Statistical Software.” Graduates of that course include Joe Palin, Alex Patel, and Jennifer Le H´egaret, all of whom are now members of the Math E-23a teaching staff. 2016-2018

I Math E-23a is made available as an online course. Enrollment jumps from 40 to 80.

I Paul launches Math 23c, which incorporates topics from Math 191, from CS 20, and from Math E-156 in place of some of the physics-oriented topics from Math 23b.