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
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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.
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
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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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
He gets into trouble with the Senior Tutor of Eliot House
for signing out his girlfriend Cherry a few minutes after
the 7 PM deadline.
1962-63
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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.
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.
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
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Paul is now married to Cherry, who has become an Oxford
graduate student. His dissertation is coming along nicely.
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
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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.
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.
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
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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.
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
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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.
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.
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
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Paul gets a new term appointment as Director of Science
Instruction Development and starts collaborating with the
math department.
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.
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
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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.
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.
Dean Michael Shinagel of the Harvard Extension School
offers Paul the new position of Director of Science,
combined with Senior Lecturer on Physics.
Paul accepts both job offers, each for 3/4 time.
1981
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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.
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.
The next year, Paul hires Henry Leitner as Assistant
Director and together they launch an Extension School
certificate program in computer science.
1982
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Paul implements Jim Baker’s algorithms in assembly
language on a custom array processor and demonstrates
real-time speech recognition.
Exxon management concludes that research is no longer
needed and slashes the research budget.
Jim and Janet Baker quit and found Dragon Systems.
Exxon Office Systems asks Paul to replace Jim as
chairman of research. Paul and fellow particle physicist
Bob Roth quit and join Dragon Systems.
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 Harvard Science Center.
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
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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.
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
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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.
Dragon beats IBM to market by a few months. Paul is
promoted to Dragon Fellow and can again do research
instead of management.
Dragon tries to do an IPO, but the investment bankers
call it off at the last minute.
2000-2001
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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.
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.
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
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Paul and John Boller create Math 152, which uses the
same format as the freshman seminar. Students love it.
Paul starts teaching probability, Math 191. It starts
stealing students from Stat 110. Faced with competition,
the statistics department hires Joe Blitzstein.
Paul takes over Math 23.
2010 - 2016
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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.
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.
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 Hégaret, all of whom are now members of
the Math E-23a teaching staff.
2016-2018
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Math E-23a is made available as an online course.
Enrollment jumps from 40 to 80.
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.