I WAS BORN IN Albuquerque but left when I was three or four, moved to Texas, and ultimately went to high school in Miami, Florida. I graduated from a big public high school, Miami Palmetto Senior High, in 1982. (Go Panthers!) There were 750 kids in my graduating class. I loved high school. I had so much fun. I lost my library privileges because I laughed too loudly in the library. I’ve had that laugh all my life. There was a multiyear period when my brother and sister would not see a movie with me because they thought it was too embarrassing. I don’t know why I have this laugh. It’s just that I laugh easily and often. Ask my mom or anybody who knows me well, and they’ll say, “If Jeff’s unhappy, wait five minutes since he can’t maintain unhappiness.” I guess I have good serotonin levels or something.

I wanted to be a theoretical physicist, and so I went to Princeton. I was a really good student, with an A+ in almost everything. I was on an honors physics track, which starts out with a hundred students, and by the time you get to quantum mechanics, it’s about thirty. So I’m in quantum mechanics, probably in junior year, and I’ve also been taking computer science and electrical engineering classes, which I’m also enjoying. But I can’t solve this one really hard partial differential equation. I’d been studying with my roommate, Joe, who also was really good at math. The two of us worked on this one homework problem for three hours and got nowhere, and we finally looked up at each other over the table at the same moment and said, “Yosanta”—the smartest guy at Princeton. We went to Yosanta’s room. He is Sri Lankan and in the “facebook,” which was an actual paper book at that time, and his name was three lines long because I guess in Sri Lanka, when you do something good for the king, they give you extra syllables in your name. So he had a super-long last name and was the most humble, wonderful guy. We show him this problem, and he looks at it. He stares at it for a while and says, “Cosign.” I’m, like, “What do you mean,” and Yosanta says, “That’s the answer.” And I’m, like, “That’s the answer?” “Yeah, let me show you.” He sits us down. He writes out three pages of detailed algebra. Everything crosses out, and the answer is cosign, and I say, “Listen, Yosanta, did you just do that in your head?” And he says, “No, that would be impossible. Three years ago I solved a very similar problem, and I was able to map this problem onto that problem, and then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosign.” That was an important moment for me because it was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist, and so I started doing some soul-searching. In most occupations, if you’re in the ninetieth percentile or above, you’re going to contribute. In theoretical physics, you’ve got to be, like, one of the top fifty people in the world, or you’re really just not helping out much. It was very clear. I saw the writing on the wall and changed my major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer science.