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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
I was highly interested in mathematics. It seemed to me to be a form of art, something very beautiful, geometry, mathematics, and the systematic way how it's built and so on. But I was somewhat bored by most of other issues that were taught at school and I became at the age -- from 13 maybe to 17, I was totally undisciplined and could not take any kind of discipline. So gradually I became a burden of the school. They asked me to go do something more productive maybe. I was -- I don't know, not hyperactive, I was a very shy introvert -- but to do something useful to work in the field, rather than spend my time in interrupting others that want to study. So I was expelled from high school in the last year. I was allowed to come to listen to the math hours and I spent the rest of the day working until I joined the army at a very early age.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
Tito said that a good military unit is a social cell where shame -- the fear of being kind of shamed by the rest of the group -- is stronger than the fear of death. And there is something true about it, that works among youngsters well-trained and somehow understanding that they are serving a cause which is somehow more important than their own. No one really bothers you in battle with this kind of overstructure of ideology and devotion and so on. And we know, unfortunately, from world experience, that you can lead people to highly devoted and professional military activities under terrible kind of regimes with terrible ideologies. But somehow, with youngsters, it works. If they have got young leaders and they are trained together, they create this kind of self-reliance of the unit, so that they are not dependent on what happens in other parts of the battlefield, but they rely upon each other. It works, and they can reach kind of activities that are against, may I say, the individual instincts of anyone in the group.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
I still remember going with my father from the collective dining room that I mentioned in the beginning and asking -- pointing to one of these Holocaust (survivors), a young woman, that came alone from Auschwitz or Majdanek -- I do not remember -- and she was taking a loaf of bread under her hand every evening from the dining room. And I asked my father why -- Anka was her name -- why Anka is taking this loaf of bread? There will be breakfast tomorrow. There will be bread on the table. He told me what hunger passed in her life will make her to her last day on earth taking this bread. She will never -- could be convinced that tomorrow there will be bread on the table. And so we -- you know, it is to a young kid of five years old or four years and a half, it kind of haunted me since then, and later on through all these wars I realized that we --that Israel is -- that we were born about the middle of last century, slightly before. Our generation did not learn the Alamo stories of his nation in the history books. We experienced them personally. It's a formative, personal, individual experience, a formative collective experience of the Israeli society. The bringing about of a Jewish sovereign entity that can defend itself, stepping back on the stage of real history. Not as a spiritual kind of heritage but as a real way of life for a people that suffered so much. So it became the kind of mobilizing factor of my life, and it gave a certain kind of meaning that you could not think of it when you are -- have to be alert to touch the trigger a split second before someone shoots at you. You don't think about history and so on. But somehow it was a kind of shaping for the whole generation that I was a part of.
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Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
My parents were both mathematicians. They obviously had a lot of fun with math. I was the eldest. I am the eldest of four. We all grew up in an atmosphere where math was sort of interesting, it was everywhere. So making pudding or making a pie involved some calculations and things. I suppose when I was little, I had two friends in elementary school, and we would discuss science. We weren't very athletic. We would walk around the playground and talk about chemistry and biology and physics, and we would wind electromagnets by taking transformer wire and wrap it around a nail. I remember those electromagnets didn't work very well. The book said you should put the nail in the hearth, in the embers of the fire, and let it cool, so that it got the right temper -- but we didn't have a fire with embers, so that never happened. The nail would become a permanent magnet. That was the first sort of interest in, I suppose, what was to become later electronics.
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Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
Later on, as I went through high school, then I came across a couple of teachers who were also great: Daffy Pernell, who taught chemistry; Frank Grundy, who taught math. Both excited, just bubbling over with enthusiasm, just so excited about the idea. So you could talk to them. Just after class, the class would all leave, and they'd continue to talk excitedly about something, maybe going out from the curriculum to something that they were actually personally more interested in. And Frank was great. When he would put a problem on the board for the class, he would say, "Okay. Work this out, for N equals 2," and then for anybody who was interested, he sort of thought, "Is that true for all N?" or "Is there a quick, better way of doing this?" Just these little teasers. Or he'd end up with having got through the algebraic with a sum, the difference between two numbers to the power of 3.5 or something, and he'd then write it down to three decimal places straight off. We thought that was magic, or he cheated, and then he'd explain how he'd use the binomial theorem or whatever it is, and have an approximation. So he was full of -- I guess it's the passion is the main thing, and just letting it radiate. So both of those were good mentors, role models.
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