How This Turing Award–winning Researcher Became a Legendary Academic Advisor
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Highlights
- The kinds of questions Blum poses read like paradoxes and have a somewhat playful quality, making complexity theory and cryptography sound almost like a subgenre of sci-fi. “He is completely original and goes off and does what he thinks is interesting and important. And often it turns out to be something really significant,” Sipser told me (View Highlight)
- “During my first few months of working with him, I thought he was testing me. And then I realized that was just him,” Russell Impagliazzo, a professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego, told me. “You had to learn how to say things so that Manuel could understand them. And that’s the most valuable skill that he gives his students, like the skill of learning to swim by being thrown into a pool: the ability to translate what you’re saying into more concrete terms. This skill proves invaluable when you are teaching a class or writing a grant proposal. (View Highlight)
- “There’s a huge difference [between] Manuel’s advising style and everyone else’s in the world,” says Impagliazzo. “Manuel’s advising style is simply to listen to you and make you seem really, really important. Like what you’re doing is the most amazing thing in the world.”
Harchol-Balter says this is the magic she is now trying to emulate with her students. “Whenever I had an idea, whatever it was, he somehow made me feel like this was the most brilliant idea that had ever been invented,” she remembers. She felt that every idea could be “a multimillion-dollar breakthrough,” which allowed her to stay committed to her line of research, undeterred by external influences or trends. “He creates this feeling of supreme confidence—not just confidence, but like, ‘You. Are. Brilliant,’” (View Highlight)
- As I made my way back to the airport, I remembered a book called Surviving Death, by the philosopher Mark Johnston. In the book, Johnston postulates that a good person could “quite literally” survive death by redirecting self-interest toward the well-being of future people. This forfeiture doesn’t spell the dissolution of the self but, rather, the expansion of it, allowing the person to live on in the “onward rush of humankind.” A line from the book unfolded, with a time-release effect, in my head: “Every time a baby is born, a good person acquires a new face.” (View Highlight)
How This Turing Award–winning Researcher Became a Legendary Academic Advisor
Metadata
Highlights
- The kinds of questions Blum poses read like paradoxes and have a somewhat playful quality, making complexity theory and cryptography sound almost like a subgenre of sci-fi. “He is completely original and goes off and does what he thinks is interesting and important. And often it turns out to be something really significant,” Sipser told me (View Highlight)
- “During my first few months of working with him, I thought he was testing me. And then I realized that was just him,” Russell Impagliazzo, a professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego, told me. “You had to learn how to say things so that Manuel could understand them. And that’s the most valuable skill that he gives his students, like the skill of learning to swim by being thrown into a pool: the ability to translate what you’re saying into more concrete terms. This skill proves invaluable when you are teaching a class or writing a grant proposal. (View Highlight)
- “There’s a huge difference [between] Manuel’s advising style and everyone else’s in the world,” says Impagliazzo. “Manuel’s advising style is simply to listen to you and make you seem really, really important. Like what you’re doing is the most amazing thing in the world.”
Harchol-Balter says this is the magic she is now trying to emulate with her students. “Whenever I had an idea, whatever it was, he somehow made me feel like this was the most brilliant idea that had ever been invented,” she remembers. She felt that every idea could be “a multimillion-dollar breakthrough,” which allowed her to stay committed to her line of research, undeterred by external influences or trends. “He creates this feeling of supreme confidence—not just confidence, but like, ‘You. Are. Brilliant,’” (View Highlight)
- As I made my way back to the airport, I remembered a book called Surviving Death, by the philosopher Mark Johnston. In the book, Johnston postulates that a good person could “quite literally” survive death by redirecting self-interest toward the well-being of future people. This forfeiture doesn’t spell the dissolution of the self but, rather, the expansion of it, allowing the person to live on in the “onward rush of humankind.” A line from the book unfolded, with a time-release effect, in my head: “Every time a baby is born, a good person acquires a new face.” (View Highlight)