My Time as Faculty at Harvard University.
In 1979, Harvard University hired me to be faculty in
the Division of Engineering and Applied
Science, initially as an Assistant Professor. Harvard had a habit of not
giving tenure to any junior faculty, which I was quite aware of, but I still
went. I wrote papers on all sorts of topics in theoretical computer science in
those days: program optimization,
the complexity of games, modal logics for reasoning about programs, robotic
motion planning, randomized algorithms, parallel algorithms, data compression,
and algorithms in computational topology and geometry, algebra, graphs, groups,
number theory, etc. At that time period I worked on parallel algebraic
algorithms with Victor Pan at CUNY.
I also worked on parallel sorting with Leslie Valiant at my
department at Harvard University. As junior faculty at Harvard I
supervised my first PhD students, Paul Spirakis and Sanguthevar
Rajasekaran.
For
most of those years I lived in another cooperative house in Medford MA –a
wonderful, albeit slightly run down, historic mansion. Jane moved in there with
me. In 1985, Jane and I got married. At that time we purchased a wonderful
small house (brick English country style) in Belmont MA which we were very fond
of, and only finally sold in 1999.
Gary
Miller had moved to MIT during this time, and he his wife lived in Belmont,
near our house. We again continued doing lots of outdoors activities together,
which now included windsurfing, in addition to cross country and telemark
skiing in the White Mountains. I wrote a series of papers with Gary on parallel
computation, using terminology taken from raking leaves. Gary is now at CMU. He
has a small airplane, and now and then his family meets us at the NC Blue Ridge
mountains or seashore.
In
1983, Harvard promoted me to Associate Professor, but I did not get tenure
there. I was (and still am) very good friends with the faculty there, and it
was a very productive period for me, so I still feel it was still a good thing
to have been there.