Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–215
you try for. But you always want to try for the best, because if you get them you win, and if you
don’t, the rest of the world still takes you seriously. There was some mathematician from
Stanford on a PMA visiting committee, and he says, “You guys seem to get to these good people
first. You’re making it really hard on the rest of us.” I said, “I hope to. In fact, I hope to leave
you guys behind, too.” Well, Stanford’s well ahead of us, but we could take Stanford. We might
have trouble with the big battalions—Berkeley, Harvard, and MIT. But, you know, being
number four would not be bad, and it’s achievable. Again, you’ve got to be insistent that the
people have to be superb, so that when you get them the rest of the world cries in pain and envy.
Where you’re unsuccessful, they say, “God, those guys are determined, aren’t they?” We’ve got
to keep doing that, and I am not convinced we are doing it with the same insistence,
determination, stubbornness, whichever way you want to characterize it. The mathematicians
love it. Everybody likes to win.
It’s depressing when you find somebody who glows in the dark and you just don’t get
them. Or you do something dumb. When Kerstin was dying, I was negotiating with this
absolutely brilliant young woman—Maryam Mirzakhani. I had her. The question was her
husband, who was good but he didn’t get a job in engineering here. Even at Stanford, where she
ended up, they only gave him an adjunct professorship that was sort of jointly with IBM
Almaden. After the fact, I realized I could have hired him. If I’d made a package deal for those
two, I would have got her. I would have gotten a young Fields Medal winner. She hasn’t won it
yet, but she’s going to. She’s going to be the first woman to win the Fields Medal. I had the
framework; I made her a fantastic offer. She wanted to come. I was distracted just enough by
my daughter dying that I just missed one detail that I shouldn’t have missed.
ASPATURIAN: It happens in all walks of life.
TOMBRELLO: Yes. I don’t like making mistakes. That’s one I still replay in my mind, roughly
three years later. I could have had her, I could have had her. And her husband probably would
have turned out to be quite good enough, too.
ASPATURIAN: That’s too bad.
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Tombrello_T