Philip Kitcher’s path into philosophy began with what he calls “good advice and a bit of serendipity.” As a math student at Cambridge, he realized he was “getting progressively less interested in mathematics,” until one supervisor told him bluntly that if he continued, he’d “end up like me—I’m only in Cambridge for the music.” That moment set him on a new course. “I decided to do the one-year course in the history and philosophy of science, thinking I’d study the history of a
Scott Aaronson’s fascination with computation began, as he recalls, “when I was two or three.” As a child, he was obsessed with “huge numbers… infinity… the speed of light and black holes—just sort of pushing things to the limits.” His father, a science writer, introduced him to ideas like the Big Bang and relativity, but it was a Nintendo console that changed his life. “I wanted to create my own Nintendo games,” he says. “It seemed like these were whole universes that someon
Alan Deardorff’s path into international economics began, as he puts it, “because I was a terrible student in physics.” After struggling through his undergraduate years at Stanford, Deardorff shifted fields almost by accident—motivated partly by the Vietnam draft and partly by curiosity. “I needed to go to graduate school because back then if I didn’t, I would have been drafted,” he recalls. “I had a few courses in economics and done reasonably well in them… so I chose econom
