Stearns Transcript Final

A. M. Turing Award Oral History Interview with Richard (“Dick”) Edwin Stearns by Dan Rosenkrantz Albany, New York November 15, 2017 Rosenkrantz: Hello, I’m Dan Rosenkrantz. It’s November 15th, 2017. I’m going to interview Dick Stearns, who won the Turing Award in 1993 with Juris Hartmanis in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundation of the field of computational complexity theory. To start, can you please tell us where you were born? Stearns: Yes. I was born in Caldwell, New Jersey on July 5th, 1936. The place I was born is just a few houses down from where President Grover Cleveland was born. Rosenkrantz: Can you tell us about your family background? Stearns: Yes. My father was born in Matawan, New Jersey, was brought up in Caldwell, New Jersey. His father graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He eventually went into the ministry and became a minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Caldwell. He married the girl next door named Mary Jeter. My father’s name is Edwin I. Stearns. My mother was born in Newark, also raised in Caldwell. Her father was born in Iowa, studied engineering at the University of Iowa, came east to work for Edison Electric Company, which eventually became GE, and then RCA. He married Clara Kemper, who was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and lived in New York City. And my mother’s name was Winifred Scales. I have a younger brother Robert who is retired from the Army Corps of Engineers, and a sister Dinny who … her last job was at Williams College where she was director of technology. Rosenkrantz: Okay. Growing up, when did you first become interested in mathematics and science? Stearns: Well, I should say more about my father. My father studied chemistry at Lafayette College, then got a master’s degree in chemical engineering at RPI, and he went to work for American Cyanamid Company in Bound Brook, New Jersey. He soon discovered that if he wanted to get further along, he should get a PhD. So the same year that I started kindergarten, he started studying for a 2 PhD at Rutgers. So it’s always been almost assumed that a PhD is your academic goal. My mother was a chemistry major at Swarthmore College. She was the only woman chemistry major there. She learned a lot of mathematics, which she was able to discuss mathematics with me as I was growing up. My father was an amateur ornithologist, well-known in New Jersey. So there was a lot of exposure to science within my family as I grew up through grammar school and middle school in North Plainfield, New Jersey. There were several books in our home library on mathematics. One was Courant and Robbins’ What is Mathematics? and a book by Gamow on One Two Three . Infinity. At some point, they also acquired a little book by Williams called The Compleat Strategyst, where they discussed two-person zero-sum games. I remember a few instances with my mother regarding mathematics. One instance, there was a fad in the school at one point where you had this… they called a “Sixteen Puzzle,” where you slide pieces around on a four-by-four grid. There was a booklet that listed different things you could do, like the numbers in sequence or the odd numbers then all the even numbers. Then the last one was called “Impossible.” There were some people who claimed they had gotten the “Impossible.” The only real way of getting that is cheating, take all the pieces out and put them back together in a different order. Well, my mother explained to me that that was impossible because you could only do even permutations. So at that point, I learned something about permutations. Another incident that comes to mind is I was interested in probabilities, having rolled dice and moved pieces around a game board. So I asked my mother about probability and she had a book which explained the elementary principles of probability. That was my background through middle school. Then we moved from North Plainfield to Plainfield, because they wanted a little bigger house since my sister had come along, and I went to Plainfield High School. My education there was great, particularly in mathematics. I remember the algebra teacher I had as a freshman, she always insisted that you always explain what you’re doing in terms of operations. So, if you were solving an equation for example, you’re supposed to say, “Well, now I’m subtracting something from both sides of the equation,” and that sort of discipline instilled some appreciation. Then after that, I took advanced math for three years under a teacher named Art Smith. He covered all the topics that one would… trigonometry, geometry, a little bit of calculus. So I was well prepared. Not only that, but found a great interest in math, but I was also well prepared for when I got to college. Rosenkrantz: Was math your favorite subject in high school and were there any subjects that you hated? 3 Stearns: Math was my favorite subject. My only thing I really didn’t like was spelling. There was no course in spelling, but in English, they give a list of spelling words to learn, a hundred words and you’re supposed to get 95 of them. I took that test and got close to, a little over 95 I think. I tried to take it again to get a higher score, but I got a worse score, so I had to take it a third time. So yeah, spelling was my least favorite. Rosenkrantz: Was there any course you hated in college? Stearns: Yes. German was my downfall. [laughs] I really struggled with that, [0:10:00] even had to repeat it a semester. When I took the second year, there was a book with scientific… chapters on science, and one of the things that was supposed to be on the test was to translate a passage from that book. Well, I spent hours and hours until I knew sort of the translation by heart. Anyway, I got through the second year of German actually with B’s, but it with a great struggle. Rosenkrantz: After high school, why did you decide to attend Carleton College? Stearns: Well, that’s another instance where chance events occurred. I knew that I should go to a small liberal arts co-ed college, since I was very introverted and I thought that would be best for me. And, of course, my mother had gone to such a college, Swarthmore. Had nature taken its course, I probably would have gone there. But my father got transferred to Chicago, and my uncle had come over, as he often did, and they said, “Well, maybe you should think about something in the Midwest.” My uncle suggested Carleton College, so I sent away for the information. Although the distance been Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota and Chicago was still quite a ways, I was attracted to it. And, after a great struggle, and I had never actually had a visit to Carleton, but something about it appealed to me and I decided to go there. So sight unseen, I picked Carleton and went there and it was a great experience for me. Rosenkrantz: Can you describe your experience at Carleton? Stearns: Yes. A number of things come to mind. First thing, during my freshman year, I got acquainted with another student, Roger Kirchner, who was also very interested in math and a top-notch student. We became best friends. We had a lifetime friendship, which turned out to be important in several ways later on. When I got to the end of my sophomore year, I had to pick a major. Well, because of the courses I had taken, I had two options, one to be a chemistry major and one to be a math major. I was a little bit concerned whether as a mathematician I could make a living. I went to the head of the department and asked him how I could make a living, and he said yeah, he knew somebody 4 who’d got a job and basically said yes, I could. Of course, math was my first love, so I signed up to be a math major. That summer after my sophomore year, I wanted to take a book home from the math library over the summer to read. I picked out von Neumann and Morgenstern’s books on Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. I was really impressed, by the way, starting from very scratch, they’d built up a model of games. I thought that’s kind of the way math should be carried out. You think if you carefully work out your model, hopefully reflecting as much as you can of the real world and then work from there. So I felt very enlightened by that book. Well, they had an arrangement where, your senior year, you could write a thesis, or a paper, do something of that ilk, and if you succeeded in doing that, you would graduate “with honors”. Kind of an alternative was doing well on your final oral exam and you would graduate “with distinction”. Well, I thought graduating with honors and having written something would be better, so I did something involving graph theory and Arrow’s paradox. Arrow’s paradox says, given preferences of voters, there is no fair way of coming to a group decision. I analyzed and said, “Well, what if we have just three people and their preferences amongst three candidates was equally likely? What is the probability that there was an outcome agreeable to all the three people?” Well, the math department – probably the chairman, Ken May – said, well, I should write that up and submit it to the Math Monthly.

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