My plan for college went awry when Stanford failed to admit me. Instead, I studied physics at CMU (BS) and the University of Pennsylvania (PhD) before taking up a faculty job at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now part of NYU).

One of the charms of working at Poly was that I could watch drug deals go down on Flatbush Avenue from my office window. My bride, Sonia, was working happily at the New York Stock Exchange at the time, so some convincing was necessary to induce her to decamp from Brooklyn to Atlanta in 1985. I have been teaching and doing research at Georgia Tech every since.

See Amazon for my two books, Physics at Surfaces and Modern Electrodynamics.

Today, Sonia is a recovering lawyer very happily engaged as the go-to real estate agent for new Georgia Tech faculty members.

My 23-year-old daughter Hannah is working in her field (sociology) and paying her own rent and car insurance in Washington, D.C. This proves there is a God.