About Me

Hello and welcome. I’m Brian Hayes. The bit-player website is my online play­ground, where I have adventures with mathematical ideas and computational toys.

On this page I’m supposed to offer a thumbnail autobiography, with emphasis on my professional accomplishments and qualifications. Over the years I’ve written several such blurbs about myself. They dwell on my glory days as an editor of science magazines, they promote a few books I’ve written, and they brag about fellowships, prizes, and the like. But I’ve grown weary of such biographical boosterism.

Here I would like to try something different. Rather than list my job titles and other career highlights, I propose to tell a few stories about my earlier years and trace some recurrent themes in my working life. If a plain old employment history is what you really want, have a look at my CV and publications list. I have organized the material into a series of mini-memoirs, most of them accompanied by souvenirs.

Warning: Parts of this narrative are going to get personal. Some readers may be disturbed by scenes of impulsiveness and folly. But there’s a happy ending!

Pitfalls of Autobiography

I’m going to begin with a critique of an earlier attempt to write my own story. This comes from 1960, when I was 10 years old.

Miss George, my sixth-grade teacher, was being generous in her comment about composition, and she showed polite restraint in her assessment of my “copy work.” But she held nothing back when she went slashing through my slipshod prose with her ruthless red pen.

Misspellings and redundancies were not the worst of my faults. Consider that vacation in California that I describe so fondly. The most notable thing about that trip is that it never happened. My parents had discussed the possibility of going to the West Coast, and I was excited about the prospect of a visit to Disneyland. But we never got to the Magic Kingdom. Instead we drove to Florida, 2,000 miles closer to our Philadelphia home. Why would I tell such a silly fib? I don’t know; it seems I was fabulating like ChatGPT. Whatever my excuse, I think the lesson for the reader is obvious: Never trust an auto­biographer. We make stuff up. We cover stuff up. Even though we’re telling our own story, we don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.

By the way, my cavalier mixing of fact and fiction goes beyond geography. “We had a lot of fun in California,” says the cheery autobiographer. Whereas in Florida I spent three days in bed with a fever brought on by severe sunburn and swimmer’s ear. Also, I could have appended to the vacation fairytale: “And when we got home, Mommy and Daddy decided to divorce.”

Splash!

When I was 13, I became obsessed with scuba diving. I was mildly interested in the things I might see under the water—schools of pretty tropical fish, toothy sharks and eels—but the root of my fascination was the kinesthetic experience. Scuba diving, I thought, was the closest one could come to free movement in three dimensions, like the kind of flying we do only in our dreams, soaring and twirling and tumbling in defiance of gravity.

Eventually I scraped together enough money to buy an air tank and a regulator and other necessary bits of gear. A Seiko diving watch was a Christmas present. What I couldn’t arrange were lessons on the use of this equipment. The YMCA would not bend on their minimum age of 16. What could I do? They left me no choice. I ordered a copy of the U.S. Navy Diving Manual and taught myself. For my first dive I went over the transom of a rowboat in Barnegat Bay, on the Jersey shore. I wasn’t able to do much flying that day. The tidal current was so strong I would have been swept out to sea if I’d let go of the anchor chain.

I wish I could show you a photo of myself as a frogman, but no one thought to record the moment.

My reason for telling this story is not that scuba diving became a major feature of my life. That fad faded fast. What became a recurrent theme was the do-it-yourself approach to education. I don’t consider myself a daredevil. I don’t jump motorcycles through hoops of flame. But I have made of habit of skipping the lessons and the certificates—just strapping on the tank and diving in. Those acts fall short of suicidal, but some of them might well be considered foolhardy.

Tales Out of School

That’s me over there—the pensive figure with bushy hair, pouty lips, and downcast eyes. I am 17, a senior in high school. The portrait artist was a class­mate, June Rundgren, who caught me unawares in a moment of calm reflection.

I wasn’t even supposed to have a senior year. By the time I got to high school, I had had enough of childhood. I was in a great hurry to grow up, to emancipate myself, to take charge of my life. Call me the anti–Peter Pan. At the end of my sophomore year I hatched a plan for escape. I would pack my roster with all the coursework I could fit, and then make an early exit. I picked out a few colleges and universities and applied for admission after my junior year. They all turned me down, with polite encouragement to try again next year. Then I heard about Shimer College in Illinois, which specialized in early-entry students. They set me up with a local alumnus for a face-to-face interview. The alum explained that he was under instructions to assess my maturity, which is why he arranged to meet me in a dive bar. Evidently I passed the test; I was offered a place in the Shimer class of 1970.

Shimer still exists. In 2014 it was named the worst college in America. I can’t offer personal testimony on that score because I never made it to campus. My plan to matriculate as a 16-year-old was derailed when I discovered a quite different shortcut to adulthood.

In the winter of my junior year, while juggling all those physics and chemistry courses, I fell headlong into a romance with a lovely and spirited and highly accomplished 24-year-old woman, a teacher of English lit and creative writing (though not in my school). I canceled my Shimer enrollment so that Barbara and I could go away and embark upon a life together. In preparation I raised some money by selling my scuba gear, and rented a room for the summer in West Philadelphia, near the Penn campus. But then Barbara went away with someone else.

I stayed on alone in the rented room that summer. My plan was to write a sensational novel about my recent experience, get it published in the fall, and become a celebrated, precocious, best-selling and critically acclaimed author. (“That’ll show her!”) I spent my days scribbling in the air-conditioned comfort of the Van Pelt Library at Penn, where I had commandeered a grad-student carrel. In the evenings I went back to my room and typed up the day’s pages on a borrowed Smith-Corona.

By the end of the summer I knew my dreams of literary glory were not going to come true. The product of my labors was not only unpublishable but also unreadable, and indeed unspeakable. (Take my word for it: You don’t want to see a sample page.) Furthermore, I had run through my funds. I was surviving on donut holes (10 cents a bag at a nearby bakery) and on the kindness of my landlord, who invited me to dinner once a week or so. Come September, I heard the bugle sound retreat, and moved back home to live with Mom again.

Returning to school that year, I felt out of place, as if I were a clodhopper too big for the student desks. Also, I had almost nothing left to study, having already taken every science and math and history course on offer. I passed most of my days in the art room, dabbling with paints and clay. I had no talent for the visual arts, but the practice was therapeutic, and I liked the other kids who hung out there. Kind, quiet, creative types. I was fighting my way back to equilibrium.

I won’t pretend to know exactly what was going on in my head the day June drew my likeness, but I may well have been pondering what to do with the rest of my life. College was not yet out of the question. I had missed the usual application deadlines, but I might have found a place somewhere. Why didn’t I try? I have many answers to that question, all different but all true. Perhaps the most important factor was this: After my summer of splendid autonomy, I no longer saw college as a pathway to adulthood but rather as a means for postponing it. Dorm life looked like a step backward.

Also, I had gotten over my broken heart and was ready to try romantic love again. There was a girl, Lynn, whom I had known since third grade. We had never kissed, never held hands, never gone on a date, and we scrupulously ignored each other whenever we were in the same room. At a party, once, I danced with every girl present except her. Behind the curtains, though, we were in constant com­munication. We wrote long, angst-filled letters, airing our grievances with the world. So one night I called Lynn and we went to a movie. We were married a year later, when I was 18 and she was three weeks short of 20.

A Scientific American

There I am again, staring you down from the ID badge issued when I joined the editorial staff of Scientific American. The time was June of 1973, six years after I left high school.

If you want to know how I managed to land that fancypants job, I can tell you a story. I was working for a news­paper, the Baltimore Sun, as the editor of the Sunday book-review depart­ment. After a year or two on the job, I began writing reviews of maga­zines as well as books. Some of those reviews were aimed at attracting the attention of the magazines’ editors. In other words, they were job applications, published for all to read in the Sunday paper.

This ethically dubious job-seeking strategy explains how I got my foot in the door at Scientific American, but in fairness to myself I will add that I really did have something to offer the magazine. I was a Two Cultures dude: a competent writer of expository prose, who also had a serious and longstanding interest in the sciences, and even a smattering of knowledge. To my surprise, no one seemed to care about my lack of academic credentials—not even the phalanx of Harvard men on the staff. Dennis Flanagan, the editor, became my mentor, my closest friend, my surrogate father. He had left college without a degree, which may have influenced his benevolence to the unlettered.

I bloomed in those years at the magazine. The job offered plenty of further opportunities for DIY education. Each month I was handed a manuscript on a new topic: photosynthesis, the expansion of the universe, population cycles in rodents, collisions of galaxies, the cerebellum, the nature of randomness, quarks, thunder, bacterial swimming, the arrow of time, rainbows. I felt like I had a seat at a big banquet table where dozens of fascinating conversations were going on all at once. And I felt like I belonged at the table, that others were actually interested in hearing what I had to say.

But I must admit it wasn’t just intellectual stimulation that delighted me there. I was also carried away by all the ego-inflating perquisites of the job. I had arrived in New York as a naive provincial. I had never been out of the country; as a matter of fact, that trip to Florida when I was 10 years old was the farthest I’d ever been from home. Now I was carrying a briefcase to my office on Madison Avenue. I was schmoozing in the upstairs lounge of a 747 on a coast-to-coast flight. I was taking the Concorde to London and Paris. I could stalk the halls of Harvard or Stanford as an emissary of an august periodical; distinguished scientists were happy to chat about their latest work. It all went straight to my head.

Let Us Calculate!

My years at Scientific American coincided with the birth of the personal computer. In 1974 Intel introduced the 8080 microprocessor; a year later the Altair computer kit (based on the Intel chip) appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics. The Homebrew Computer Club began meeting in Palo Alto; at one of those meetings Steve Wozniak demonstrated a prototype of the first Apple computer. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to create a BASIC interpreter for some of the new machines.

I followed these developments with fanboy enthusiasm, avidly reading the new hobbyist magazines: Creative Computing, Byte, Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia. Meanwhile Scientific American stood on the sidelines. We published articles about semiconductor technology, about theoretical aspects of computer science, and about applications of computing in the sciences. But there was nothing in our pages that took a hands-on approach, that spoke to the needs of those who were sitting at the keyboard of one of the new machines, trying to figure out what to do with it.

By the time IBM brought out a PC in 1981, it was clear that computing for the masses was not a passing fad. I put together a proposal for a new department in the magazine, to be called “Computer Recreations.” Furthermore, I insisted I would write it myself. Dennis was not enthusiastic, but he indulged me. I was offered a summer of relief from other duties while I got the column started. After that, I would have to take up the editorial grind again.

The schedule allowed me eight weeks to produce the text of my first column. But before I could start writing about the wonders of the microcomputer, I had to go out and buy one. As yet I had never yet written a line of code or laid hands on a computer keyboard. This was scuba diving without lessons all over again, except the penalty for failure was worse than drowning. I was at risk of embarrassing myself in front of a million scientifically literate readers.

Those first few months of total immersion in DO-LOOPs and GOSUBs were like an extended visit to a foreign country, just long enough to begin learning the lingo and the culture. I quickly fell into a nerdy routine of working through the night, staring at the glowing green text on the dark face of the cathode-ray tube. At daybreak I had to be dragged back into the “real” world.

My first column appeared in October of 1983.

I then completed the rest of my allotted six installments. I was heartbroken when I had to turn the column over to my successor. (But the successor, A. K. Dewdney of the University of Western Ontario, carried on brilliantly for several years more.)

Abdication

The news clipping reproduced here comes from The New York Times of January 6, 1984. It announces, among other things, my appointment as editor of Scientific American. This was a major promotion. There’s a big difference between being an editor and being the editor. I had made it to the top, and I was mighty proud of myself. But a week later I called a meeting and announced that I would not be assuming the editorship after all, and indeed I was leaving the staff of the magazine.

WTF?

From a distance of 40 years I can look back on this affair as if from the outside—as if it were someone else pulling that crazy stunt. And from this exterior perspective I conclude there must have been some very powerful forces at work inside me, or I never would have had the courage to do what I did. It was like standing at the altar next to your beloved and saying, after a moment of reflection, “As a matter of fact, no, I do not.”

I can cite rational, calculated, logical motives for my decision to walk away, but I don’t really believe they can explain such an impulsive act. Only affairs of the heart have the power to bring madness to a full boil. And I certainly was in emotional tumult at the time. I had succumbed to a great passion. My marriage was in ruins. I had to get away.

It will come as no surprise that I was overtaken by regret almost immediately—while I was still on the road out of New York, piloting a rental truck loaded with my belongings. For years afterward I searched for the Undo button that would take me back to 1984 and the office on Madison Avenue. But—and this is also no surprise—the girl I had jilted at the altar would not give me a second chance.

Although I couldn’t go back, a few years later I was handed an opportunity to do it all over again. In 1990 I became the editor of American Scientist, the nonprofit doppelgänger of Scientific American. I entered into this project with daydreams of redemption, and with high hopes. The magazine was already quite good, and our little band of editors and artists was going to build it up into something bigger and better. That program would succeed over the next few years, but not under my direction. In short order I made the alarming discovery that I didn’t actually enjoy being the boss, and furthermore I was no good at it. This time, happily, I was able to make a more graceful exit. Rosalind Reid, who joined the staff shortly after I did, was not only a top-notch editor but also a deft manager of people, and someone who could get an issue to the printer on time. As quickly as I could, I surrendered the magazine to her. (Later I surrendered myself as well: Rosalind and I are married now.)

It shouldn’t take 40 years to figure out what you’re really meant to be doing in this world—but maybe that’s the cost of a do-it-yourself education. As I see it now, renouncing the role of editorial pooh-bah was one of the few wise decisions I made in those years. It allowed me to pick up the thread of those six “Computer Recreations” columns, and see where it would lead me. I have continued writing essays in that genre ever since, publishing them in American Scientist and various other magazines as well as here on bit-player.org. It has become a way of life, a rewarding one.

I’ve managed to get through recent decades with much less melodrama. No more romantic debacles or abrupt about-face maneuvers. I’m no longer in such a hurry to grow up. Paddling in calmer waters makes my story less of a thriller for those reading it, but a good deal easier on me as I live through it. I don’t mean to say that I’ve had no more adventures. It’s just that my voyages of discovery have been more inward. Mostly I wrestle with an urge to understand things, to make sense of the world we all live in. That world often fights back.

We Must Know

I don’t remember where I got the embroidered patch shown here. I glued it to my backpack several years ago. The fellow in the hat is David Hilbert, the ringleader of German mathematics circa 1900, and an agenda-setter for the worldwide math community. His slo­gan, “Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen.” is rendered into English as: “We must know. We will know.” He spoke those words in 1930, just before Kurt Gödel published his proof that cer­tainty and consistency are not always possible in mathematics. In other words, despite Hilbert’s ardent declaration, there are things we might never know.

I would like to stand with Hilbert on the side of epistemological optimism. I really want to believe that the universe is comprehensible, that it will yield up its secrets if we just ask the right questions. But I don’t always succeed in persuading myself (let alone anyone else). Sometimes I don’t even understand what it means to understand.

Alongside Hilbert’s defiant motto I would mention the dictum of Donald E. Knuth: “Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer.” Or Richard Feynman’s last message to the world: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” These formulations suggest that if I truly understand something—the trajectories of colliding billiard balls, spontaneous traffic jams, the spread of an epidemic—I should be able to create a replica of that phenomenon in a computer program. Is it too much to ask that computers be capable of supporting such models? Maybe so: The challenge has defeated me over and over. I’m going to keep trying anyway. In this curious undertaking, even failure is fun.

One more inspirational quote, an old favorite of mine, from Bertrand Russell:

A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than in action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries. A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.

The windows Russell opened for a breath of fresh air looked out on mathematical landscapes. I have found solace in the same territory, and in the adjacent neighborhoods of computer science. There’s nothing like messing about with numbers and algorithms to chase the blues away. And yet I think the converse of Russell’s statement is also true. A life passed entirely in the empyrean realms of pure thought is likely, sooner or later, to dry up and blow away. We are material and biological and social organisms, and we need to stay connected—plugged in to both the inner life and the outside world.

The Real Me

Having displayed images of myself as an adolescent and as an absurdly young man, I suppose I am now duty-bound to show you something more recent. You demand to see the balding pate and sagging jowls. Well, demand all you want. Remember, this is my website. Besides, I’ve already warned you not to trust an autobiographer.

I offer this wind-tousled figure, emerging from the sea like Botticelli’s Venus on the half shell, as my present avatar. I confess: It’s been 30 years since this jaunty fellow greeted me in the bathroom mirror when I get up in the morning. Nevertheless, this is the me I see in the mirror I carry around in my mind.