I finally quit drinking on 18 January 1977, two months before my 29th birthday. Years later I described my experience to a nurse who worked with alcoholics and she informed me that I had had alcohol seizures. In 1976 I had a very scary experience that convinced me that I would soon lose my life to alcohol. This was hard on the people close to me, and in the years since I have apologized to many of them. During the 1970s I lost my love, my friends and my career to alcohol. Returning to Madison, I got deeper into drugs and alcohol, and almost incidentally picked up a masters degree in Computer Science in 1974. If I had applied and gone to Harvard, where my love was a student, or to MIT, my life might have turned out quite differently. I found young love while at Princeton but was still unhappy enough there to leave before the end of my first semester. For math grad school I was accepted by Princeton, Stanford, Michigan and Wisconsin, and enrolled at Princeton in 1970 because the guidebooks said it was the best math school in the US. But I also developed a real taste for drugs and alcohol. as a paper grader in their graduate analysis course (Math 721) during my sophomore year, and got honorable mention on the Putnam Competition in 19. For example I was employed by the Math Dept. I enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1966 where I continued to excel in math. I taught myself calculus while in the 8th grade, analytic function theory and general relativity while in 9th grade.
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Second, I was the best math student in the history of my high school. They had a shouting match over dinner every night for 50 years. My mother was loving toward my brother and me but my father was perpetually angry.
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There are two relevant facts about my childhood.
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He showed us how to make the world better through his curiosity, inventiveness, commitment, and respect for the people who worked for him. It is also the story of what I learned from Verner Suomi, SSEC's founding director and the father of weather satellites. It is a story of second chances: the second chance at a career that SSEC gave me after I ruined my life with alcohol, and my second chance to make McIDAS better after SSEC management kicked me out of the project. This is the candid story of my career at SSEC.