My interest in the sciences started with mathematics in the very beginning, and later with chemistry in early high school and the proverbial home chemistry set.

Growing up, mostly in Montreal, I was an only child of loving parents.

Being exposed to theory, stimulated by a basic love of concepts and mathematics, was a marvelous experience.

Life would be indeed easier if the experimentalists would only pause for a little while!

During my McGill years, I took a number of math courses, more than other students in chemistry.

My education at Baron Byng High School was excellent, with dedicated masters (boys and girls were separate).

After a subsequent interview at Brooklyn Poly, I was hired, and life as a fully independent researcher began.

After some minor pieces of theoretical study that I worked on, a student in my statistical mechanics class brought to my attention a problem in polyelectrolytes.

My life as a working theorist began three months after this preliminary study and background reading, when Oscar gently nudged me toward working on a particular problem.

I have always loved going to school.

Tread the path one has walked, before stoning them!

There are some lessons you can never find in a classroom, hence you need to learn from every person and every situation that you encounter.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

I spent more time at the library than anyone my age when I was a kid.

When you first start out, you are just happy to get a job, any job. And as time goes on, either you move forward or screech to a halt.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

I was not scared of anything, when I read my book.

People talk about nature as a mother, but to me she's always been Medea, ready and willing to slaughter her children.

People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe.

The great charm of fly-fishing is that we are always learning.