Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–77
TOMBRELLO: Yes. I remember that visit, and Niels Bohr had visited Rice while I was a student
there. I remember he was very hard to understand, and I thought it was because he doesn’t speak
English, and somebody said, “No, he speaks English, he just doesn’t speak very clearly. You
have to listen very carefully. But it’s definitely worth the trouble.” He spoke slowly. I would
describe it as mumbling. The son, Aage, who just died a year or so ago [September 2009], was a
good deal younger. He had been with his father during the war. They’d had to get out of
Denmark and were for a short time in Los Alamos together. Code name “Nick Baker,” that was
Niels Bohr. We had a lot of visitors. The people who had sort of started accelerator nuclear
physics at the Cavendish [Laboratory at the University of Cambridge] appeared. People knew
Charlie, and they knew DuBridge, and of course we had these bright people over in theory,
Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, who were an attraction to all sorts of people, who
came to see the wonder kids who were doing marvelous things. [Richard Chace] Tolman
[professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics, d. 1948] was dead already. [H. P.]
Robertson [professor of mathematical physics] died the day I arrived, of an embolism following
an automobile accident.
ASPATURIAN: That must have been a rough welcome.
TOMBRELLO: Yes. Of course I didn’t know him, but to suddenly arrive on the day that
somebody who is really quite famous dies— Among the mathematicians, Eric Temple Bell was
gone, I believe [retired 1959, d. 1960—ed.]; and [Harry] Bateman was dead [d.1946]. You have
plenty of stuff on Bateman and the “shoe box” file. His project was still running, though,
collecting the stuff on higher transcendental functions and integral transforms. Some of the
earlier people were still around: [Fritz] Oberhettinger and [Francesco G.] Tricomi, [Wilhelm]
Magnus, I believe were all still here, and I probably met one of them, I can’t remember which
one. That was about 1962. I’d gotten interesting in scattering theory and had figured out a way
to do a calculation on the old Burroughs 220 computer, which was by far the best computer I’d
ever used at that point in my life. It was more advanced than the computer I’d talked my way
into at Rice. Everybody knows computers are run on binary arithmetic, but the IBM 650 I had
used as an undergrad ran on biquinary. It was like Roman numerals. It had a five bit, and it had
four digits. It was not binary. The Burroughs 220 was a lot faster than the IBM machine I had
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