Walter Kohn as Ph.D. Advisor

Abstract

Much of life is luck. A member of the class of 1955 in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, I discovered that, because I had talked my way out of English and Chemistry, and worked hard, they would give me a Master’s degree for staying an extra semester. During those months, in addition to doing some forgettable research on the creep of metals, I took half a course on quantum mechanics — taught, as it turned out, by Sidney Drell — thinking that a slightly better understanding of Nature could not hurt a practicing engineer. It did more. Before leaving Cambridge, to return to India and find work, I applied to some graduate schools for admission in Physics and asked Drell for advice. He told me about a Harvard instructor named Walter Kohn who had recently gone to Carnegie Tech, and was doing interesting work in solid state physics. During the summer of 1956, as I contemplated jobs in which the salary was inversely proportional to the challenge, telegrams arrived offering me fellowships to Harvard and Carnegie. I accepted the latter, causing consternation among my American friends’ mothers.