Interview with David Rumelhart, March 30, 1993, San Francisco ER: Maybe we could start with the circumstances of your growing up, things like that. OR: I was born in South Dakota, in a small town called Lexington Springs. Its size was about 1,000, 1,500 people. I was born June 12, 1942. I went to the University of South Dakota for my undergraduate work. I started out there in Philosophy. ER: Can we back up a little bit? I'd really like to know more about what the atmosphere was like at home, how you got interested in ideas ,, . DR: How do I start? I have two siblings, both younger, two brothers. My parents were born and were raised in the same small town, and lived there their whole lives. My father was a printer who worked in a print shop from the time he was 14 until he retired. My mother has been a librarian for the last 40 years, something like that, and the only librarian in the town library. The town is a small town and the area around it is all rural. The main point of the town is to serve the farmers in the area. I lived in town. The high school I went to was a high school of about 200 people, about half from the town and about half from the surrounding area. I suppose in terms of academic interests, my parents had both been good students but neither of them went to college. In fact I was about the first in family to go to college. My mother had been a school teacher for about a year, but in those days that meant going to six weeks of training, and then Page 2 David Rumelhart you could go and be a school teacher until you got married and then you had to quit. Once you were married you were somehow not fit to be a teacher anymore. In any case, she was a school teacher for a year or two after she got out of high school. School was an important thing in our family. My father was always proud of the fact that he was good at mathematics. Basically he went through high school, and that was about all although he was in the Navy. In the Navy he did work that involved studying some more mathematics. ER: When you were growing up, when you were in elementary school and high school, were you interested in things that became . part of your career? DR: I always did well in grade school and high school. I wasn't particularly a book reader in the way that some people are. I liked sports. This was one of the things that rry father thought was very important so I played football and basketball and baseball and ran in track. Of course in a high school of 200 people, that was not so difficult. I did well in school in spite of the fact that I wasn't very oriented toward studying. Of course this was the '50s, when I was in grade school and high school and people's views of things were different. The idea of doing homework was something that nobody ever thought about. I remember X used to read the encylcopedia. We had the World Book encyclopedia, and I read the entire thing over a period of time. I Page 3 David Rumelhart ER: Alphabetically? or.at random? DR: Not at random, exactly, I had topics of interest, and I would read about those and then I would just pick up a volume and read it. A bit odd, I suppose, I was always interested in things. My father was a person who believed in a kind of apprenticeship and I always thought, well, if something was in a book somewhere, I could read about it and figure out how to do it. I didn't really need to bother with learning at rry father's knee about how to hammer nails or all the different things that he did. My father was a great debater. I learned to be a debater as a child. We would debate politics, we would debate religion, we would debate, you name it, everything. He had a kind of anti-intellectual bent to him. He thought that intellectuals didn't really know about the real world. This was a common thread of debate because I always felt that we could figure things out by thinking about them. ER: Where do you think that notion came from? DR: Probably mother, liy mother is a person who is relatively quiet. She was a librarian. She was much more oriented toward books and intellectual pursuits. I suppose it was iry mother that had this idea. It was a valid idea, just trying to figure out how to do things. It wasn't anything she ever said, any discussion we ever had. It was, I think, just her attitude. In school, for whatever reason, I found teachers easier to interact with on the whole than iry peers. I always had good relationships with rr^ teachers. I remember spending hours after school talking with j Page 4 David Rumelhart teachers when I was in elementary school, about all kinds of things. In particular, I remember discussing the Korean war with my teachers, the death of Stalin, all these things that were occurring in the early '50s. I had some teachers who were important in iry life. They were always very encouraging. I did well in school, even though it was sort of not the right way to be, to be particularly bookish or particularly oriented toward succeeding in school or doing well in school. It was just that I did it. That was not a problem for me one way or the other. I was able, nevertheless, to be as undisciplined as anyone else, I might say a little bit about high school. It was interesting, because one of my teachers in high school, a math teacher, had never had calculus. There was only one person in the high school who had ever taken calculus and that was the typing teacher. I remember that ny math teacher, who had never taken this advanced subject felt that this other person was somebody like a god because he had taken calculus. The other thing that I remember about this teacher was teaching me to use the slide rule which was sort of fun. Years later he became a car salesman or something. My father encountered'him once. He had moved, lived in a different town. This happened to be at the time when I was at the Institute for Advanced Study for a year and I still had ny little slide rule. He was impressed that I still had this little slide rule I had gotten when I was a sophomore in high school. I Page 5 David Rumelhart In high school, as I say, I did well. I was the salutatorian, the second highest ranking student in iry class of about 50. I had this image when I was going off to college, I remember well. I figured well gee, if I'm 2nd out of 50 at Lexington Springs what will X be when I go to college. I figured that, you know maybe the top ten percent would go. I estimated that that would be 2nd out of 5, if we're talking ten percent, so that puts me at about 60 percent. So I figured I'd probably be a B or a C student in college, that's what I imagined. Of course when I went to college, it turned out that maybe people in it^ high school were little better than I thought, and I actually did very very well. As I said, I started out in philosophy. My father wanted me to study engineering, and I just didn't want to do engineering. It sounded boring to me, something I just didn't want to do. That was the only real conflict, that is, serious conflict, we had many debates, but serious conflict, I ever had with rt^ father. They also wanted me to go to the local Junior College, in the town, which had about 80 students or something. I had an athletic scholarship to this college. But instead I went to the University of South Dakota and started studying philosophy. ER: That was the first time you were away from home? DR: Yeah. It was. I moved away then and I more or less never went back. I didn't spend more than a week or two at home in a stretch after I went off to college. I started out in philosophy until I got bored with that and decided that the philosophers were too much into just debating and not enough into thinking about Page 6 David Rumelhart things, or doing anything. I moved into psychology. I took it as a kind of empirical approach to epistemology. My idea was that the psychologists were looking to see what was going on, whereas the philosophers were only talking about it. I had several jobs, since I really didn't have any money. I worked as a cook in the cafeteria for my food. I lived in the basement of a church, and I was the church janitor which is how I managed to pay for rny room. I had scholarships that paid for my tuition. That was it. I worked the summer before I went to college, I worked in a grocery store and earned some money to pay for going to see a movie, or something.