The iconic images for me as a child were Walt Disney on television and the other was Albert Einstein, who had embodied this thing about understanding the world. I grew up liking both of those, but the deepest thing that I wanted to do was become an animator. I did a lot of drawing all the way through high school. I even had a class where I got an A plus, plus, plus. Now, I know that was based more on quantity than quality.

As I went from high school to go to college, I realized that I didn’t know how to get the skills and it was not up to the level that I saw in the Disney animators, so I switched over to Physics.

Here’s the interesting thing I found. I’ve told this story before, as you would guess, over the years, and there’s always a titter and laughter in the audience, because the general concept that we have is to go from art to science is incongruous.

Why is it incongruous to go from one to the other and why do we think of them as two very different personalities? I will say that over the years, I have known world-class mathematicians and scientists and artists and programmers, and if I were to take another characteristic, let’s say it’s their organizational skills, the ability to get stuff done. I haven’t found a correlation between them.