4 - The Impact of the Internet

Summary

Many years passed. I received my doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Illinois with a thesis in computational geometry and found myself a faculty position in Computer Science at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Jai alai would have to wait awhile. As an Assistant Professor, your efforts revolve around getting tenure. Publish or perish isn't too far from the truth, but what you publish makes a big difference. I wouldn't have gotten tenure even if I had published 100 articles on jai alai because this work wouldn't (and shouldn't) carry much respect with the powers that be in academic computer science.

But 6 years later I found myself a tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science. Tenure gives you the freedom to work on whatever you want. You have to teach your classes, and you have to do your committee work, but otherwise what you do with your time is pretty much up to you. If I wanted to devote a little effort to an interesting mathematical modeling problem, well, nobody was going to stop me.

By now my parents had retired to Florida, and each winter my brother Len and I would pay them a visit. Each visit included an obligatory trip to watch jai alai, and so on January 17, 1995, we spent the evening at the Dania fronton. On arrival, our first action was, as always, to buy a Pepe's Green Card. Our second step was to convince ourselves of its infallibility.