Table of Contents:
“…Paris : exam hell, agony of choice, and one day at the Ecole Normale Superieure, 1944-45 ; A (then rare) foreign student at Ecole Polytechnique, 1945-47 ; Pasadena : student at Caltech during a Golden Age, 1947-49 ; French air force engineers : reserve officer in training, 1949-50 ; Growing addiction to classical music, voice, and opera ; Life as a grad student and Philips Electronics employee, 1950-52 ; First Kepler moment : the Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution of word frequencies, 1951 ; Postdoctoral Grand Tour begins at MIT, 1953 ; Princeton : John von Neumann's last postdoc, 1953-54 ; Paris, 1954-55 ; Wooing and marrying Aliette, 1955 ; In Geneva with Jan Piaget, Mark Kak, and Willy Feller, 1955-1957 ; An underachieving and restless maverick pulls up shallow roots, 1957-58 -- My life's fruitful third stage. …”