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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
I remember my own father, which is now 91 years old, repeating to me once and again this point from Isadore Rabi's story about how he became a scientist. He said the most influential moment was that his mother repeatedly when he used to come back from school at a very early age of eight or nine asking him, "Isadore, have you asked kind of a good question today?" Not "What you have learned?" not "What you have observed?" but "Have you raised a good question today?"
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
You know, we didn't have a school system at the time that would prepare the students for college. No matriculation. No formal systematic coverage of a certain syllabus or curriculum that will enable you to enter. It was kind of a rural, remote school system, very caring, very open, very encouraging kind of "do it your way," which is very modern today, but without kind of sets of standards that should be achieved and practically began to learn systematically only when I was adult, about 23 or 24 when I made my matriculation when I was already an operational officer in the armed forces.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
So unlike what you typically relate to military service, I felt that I'm growing up and developing in a kind of environment of the freedom of the spirit, and the freedom of imagination, the freedom to dare whatever you think. It puts a lot of burden of responsibility not to take too much of a risky approach, but it makes you responsible. We used to say, "You are the commander in the field, you are responsible to it. No one can help you from somewhere in some command post in the rear." And it shapes young people, you know, in a unique way if they're ambitious in a way, if they're predisposed for leadership.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
All my life I was stimulated by business activity. It looked to me something -- the closest thing to war. You don't kill the other guy but, you know, there's an active attempt of one to defeat most of the others and a certain partial kind of cooperation, and the fact that you cannot act effectively unless you understand the whole picture and at the same time give attention to details. And sometimes your defeat can come from someone that you don't even see at first. It became clear after two months that (Yitzhak) Rabin wants me to come to join government. The last few years I was deeply involved in his effort to have the agreement with the Palestinians. As the top military authority I have to express my views about what it means, what are the calculated risks that we can afford. And his effort to reach an agreement with the Jordanians, which ended up with a peace agreement with King Hussein. And I had a very close and warm relationship with King Hussein that began years earlier during the Gulf War and even before. And then I was sent by Rabin to meet the Syrian Chief of Staff here at the Blair House where, you know, I was just a civil servant. The Syrian Chief of Staff is number two in the Syrian politics. He is a political figure and the closest friend at the time of President Assad. So I was somehow exposed to these kind of political kind of experiences in this field of security and foreign affairs.
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Gary Becker
Nobel Prize in Economics
Gary Becker: What we call human capital, that is, investments in people's education and training. I started working on that as soon as I came to Columbia in 1957. A small project, estimating how much, say, earnings that people could get from improving their education, by going to college rather than high school, for example. How much more they earned, what happened to their occupations, their unemployment, all the aspects of their economic situation. And starting doing that, I saw this was a much bigger problem than I had anticipated, and a much more challenging issue to look at more generally, the issue of investments in people, in knowledge, and in skills and in training. So I sat down to try to look at that in a very general way, both theoretically and then to also make these variety of calculations for the United States and a little bit for other countries. And I wrote a book called Human Capital that was published in 1964 on that subject. And some people will say that's the most important book I've written. I don't know if that's true. It certainly, maybe in some sense, has been the most influential thing I've done.
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Gary Becker
Nobel Prize in Economics
I was rushing down to Columbia, driving down to give an oral exam to a Ph.D. student. I had to park, and I had to decide whether to park illegally on the street around the Columbia neighborhood, or put it in a parking lot which was further away and of course cost some money. And I said, "Well, what's the chance I'll get a ticket?" And I made a calculation in my head and I left it on the street. And as I walked over to the exam, I said, "But if I'm going through that calculation, then the police must also be deciding how often they should inspect in order to determine what's the right thing for them to do, which is costly." So I asked the poor student to solve that problem when I came in, and he or she -- I don't remember whether it was a man or a woman -- she couldn't do it, not naturally. I was looking more at the thought processes and not whether they could do it, and they did fine. And then I kept thinking about it, that this was a good problem, because if we take the approach I used, that people decide on crime with similar sort of calculations as they decide on whether to become a professor, that's the starting point. There is no difference between criminals and professors in that sense. Of course, some people are honest, they don't want to be criminals. But the kind of calculation, "Can I do better by this?" as opposed to something else, is a calculation I think a lot of criminals make. And now we have to have enforcement. How much money do we want to put into enforcement? To capturing and convicting and punishing people? If we improve legal opportunities through education -- my human capital work came in -- then that should reduce crime. So I built a framework to discuss those issues, where improving education will reduce crime, improving the likelihood that we will apprehend and convict criminals would reduce crime, and then I went back and looked how criminals will respond to this and came to a bunch of conclusions about how much we should put into one activity, another activity. I did some preliminary tests on this with actual data, whether the criminals actually respond to punishment, whether improvements in education reduce crime. I had a series of students who followed that up. So this is the way the area developed. It's now a very big area in economics, some very good work being done, some by my students, some by a lot of other people. But my orientation was this little sort of experience I had going to this exam, and then building on my type of work at that time.
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Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
I was really lucky to know how a computer worked, 'cause I'd built one. I built it. I had my terminal with its 64-character lines, and I had it connected to my computer, which was in a crate this big with a big car battery at the bottom in case the power failed. I knew how it worked because I knew how I could have built the chip out of gates, and I knew how I could have built the gates out of transistors. I didn't really know how transistors worked, but I knew I could have made the equivalents of a transistor. I learned a certain amount from the physics course about how solid-state systems work, and I knew how I could emulate each of those out of nails. So now, when I look at a laptop, I see all those pixels and see the windows moving. I know that I could build the operating systems, and I have built little operating systems since. I don't know how well anybody nowadays, without going through that historical phase, could ever feel that they really know how a computer works.
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Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
Math was my favorite subject, I suppose, at school, but on the other hand, I was interested in this electronics. So I thought I'd do physics as being a compromise between the two. It wasn't. It was something completely different, I realized. The philosophy of physics is different, and I think physics is pretty special. I'm glad that I did do it, but it did not prepare me. It did not turn me into a mathematician, and it did not really allow me to do electronics. It allowed me to do a lot of thinking, all sorts of interesting ways, and I realized the relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic. The microscopic rules of behavior of atoms, and the macroscopic behavior of them and so on, is really very interesting. That difference is now crucial between the microscopic way in which two computers interact over the network and the way the whole web behaves, which we're now calling "web science." The difference between the microscopic and the macroscopic is still a challenging step.
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Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Father of the World Wide Web
What people describe as the "Aha!" moment, the "eureka" moment, I think this idea of it being a moment, I'm very suspicious of. I don't actually believe that Archimedes sat in the bath, saw the water up, and said "Eureka!" I think he probably tried all kinds of things. He tried ways of filling the crown full of little marbles maybe and counting the marbles. Goodness knows what. No, he tried all kinds of ways of estimating its volume. And then he figured, "Ah goodness! Yeah. Water will do it!" But he'd done a lot of preparation, and he probably had a lot of ideas pretty close to it. And in fact, it didn't happen -- (snaps). If you'd started him off on the problem totally fresh and sat him in the bath, nothing would have happened. It wouldn't have happened without him discussing the problem with people, without him starting to form all of these hypotheses, half-formed things.
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