Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–217
TOMBRELLO: He did not come because I didn’t get his daughter on the phone. I could have sold
her in a minute. It’s a package deal. It’s what the family thinks, too.
ASPATURIAN: How do you know who the best people are?
TOMBRELLO: You don’t. You don’t. But you’ve got the usual stuff. You’ve got what they’ve
published. And the staffing committee is very sturdy. They read this material. So we have
pretty good track records on people. We know how they’ve performed in various races. It’s like
buying a horse. Occasionally you get a Seabiscuit, which comes out of the blue, or a Zenyatta.
Great race horses that were undervalued when they were young and people got a bargain.
ASPATURIAN: Do you have an example?
TOMBRELLO: Who was undervalued when he got here? A person people didn’t take quite as
seriously as they should have was Danny Calegari [Merkin Distinguished Professor of
Mathematics]. We got him as an assistant professor [2002]. He changed his major in college.
He’d been a poet, and a good one, from Australia, although I think he got his PhD in the United
States [UC Berkeley, 2000]. He wasn’t exactly undervalued, but more like Zenyatta—the price
was reasonable. But considering the subsequent performance, clearly we got a bargain with
Danny. In some ways, I knew he was going to be interesting, because even before he came I put
him on the Math Advisory Committee, which does the staffing in math. He would call in with
his comments, and he was very insightful about this. He was young. He was totally committed,
and he had good taste in people. And I knew this guy has got something; and clearly he did—he
got to be a professor, and a named professor, very quickly. He has won one of these Clay prizes.
He wasn’t exactly a sleeper. This was not Seabiscuit, but he might run like Seabiscuit. He was
clearly a bargain.
Another hire that surprised everybody, although he wasn’t exactly a bargain, was Alexei
Borodin [Binder/Amgen Professor of Mathematics]. I hired him right out of grad school as a full
professor [2003]. Boy, did that cause problems on the IACC! It sort of divided the vote. Very
young. Publishing great mathematics as an undergrad, so even though he was young, he had a
track record that went back. Stolper, who was GPS chairman at the time, was very much against
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