Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
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<strong>Tombrello</strong>–128<br />
ASPATURIAN: It sounds like you were very fond of him personally.<br />
TOMBRELLO: I really liked him. I liked a lot of the people over there very, very much.<br />
ASPATURIAN: It’s a good division. Who else over there comes to your mind, in geo and<br />
planetary?<br />
TOMBRELLO: Well, I think hiring Goldreich was an absolutely brilliant thing. The story of his<br />
being hired [1966] is probably in the Archives somewhere. Let’s see—John Bahcall was at<br />
<strong>Caltech</strong> then. He and I had come about the same time.<br />
ASPATURIAN: This is the neutrino astrophysicist John Bahcall [d.2005]?<br />
TOMBRELLO: Yes, and we were young professors, untenured, I think, when this came up. We<br />
heard about this guy Goldreich at Cornell who had solved the three halves problem for the orbit<br />
of Mercury, and we decided we could offer him a senior postdoc position, which he turned down<br />
and took an assistant professorship at UCLA. That was OK, for a while. Goldreich was a bit of<br />
a jock. More than a bit of a jock. One day he was waiting for a squash court. The person using<br />
it was staying overtime, and I guess Peter knocked on the door, the window, and said, you know,<br />
it’s our turn. This guy was, I believe, a quarterback. He took this badly and tried to beat Peter to<br />
death <strong>with</strong> a squash racket. Peter’s very strong, but this was a full-time, much larger jock, and<br />
the encounter was clearly somewhat one-sided. The university basically tried to whitewash that,<br />
and Peter came to <strong>Caltech</strong>. And the rest is history. Peter is—<br />
ASPATURIAN: A brilliant man.<br />
TOMBRELLO: A brilliant man. He is remarkable in— People tell me about the importance of<br />
citation indices and things like that. I say, “Well, there’s Goldreich.” He never published very<br />
many papers, but every one of them was a gem, an absolute gem. They opened up everything.<br />
He and I used to run together, be jocks together. Very competitive person. Very interesting<br />
person. As I say, in addition to the science, he did one big, wonderful thing, which was to make<br />
sure Patterson got a professorship.<br />
http://resolver.caltech.edu/<strong>Caltech</strong>OH:OH_<strong>Tombrello</strong>_T