NATHAN MYHRVOLD PhD ORAL HISTORY - The Computerworld ...

I was 14 years old in this class, and this guy has singled me out on the first day of
class, and he tells me I’m going to fail the thing. And I said, “No I don’t think so.”
And he sort of accepted it and he moved on. It was a very interesting thing, because
it was right on the edge of me thinking, this guy’s a lunatic. I should get the hell out
of this class. Moving from there to, wanting to be challenged by it. He had done it
in the right. He had gone right up the edge of that divide as to whether it was just
being ass hole or whether he was actually being inspiring. I loved the class, and I did
get an A in that class, and in the following class after that.
I think he was an inspiring guy, a lot because of his attitude. He emphasized people
really understanding things, not just having a rote combination of facts. I’m sure I
would have gotten an A in anybody else’s class. I generally got A’s in classes, but still
it really made an impression on me.
DA: Did you have to study hard to get good grades, or did it seem to come
naturally, or was it a combination of hard and natural ability?
NM: Mostly I didn’t study hard, for some classes I would. There were some classes
where I’d be scared and I’d study real hard, and there were others I didn’t. In
general school was never all that difficult for me. There are friends of mine who are
brilliant people and incredibly accomplished people, who never did well in school or
got disgusted with school and dropped out. As much as I have respect for them, I
have to say I was the opposite. I mean I did very, very well in school. I always
wanted to take more classes than I possibly could fit in a period of time.
I never met a course catalogue I didn’t like. You could read about some course in
anthropology, or art history, or some other damn thing that was way away from what
I was supposed to be doing, and I would find a reason I could be interested. I also
discovered that there are more interesting course catalogue descriptions than there
are interesting courses. You know, it’s much more interesting to write a single
paragraph than it is to do something over a whole semester.
DA: As a boy did you play around with technology or are you more interested in
the theoretical sciences?
NM: Constantly I played around with technology, and not just technology. I was
very into cooking, so that was one theme I always did. I remember there was a point
where I was very interested in biology. For some reason I got interested in
taxidermy. So I was stuffing animals.
Nathan Myhrvold
Oral History
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