As an undergraduate at Yale, he desperately wanted to stay in the Ivy League for graduate school. Unfortunately Princeton rejected his application. Harvard said yes but seemed to be dragging its feet about providing the financial support he needed. His best option, though he found it depressing, was MIT. In Gell-Mann’s eyes, MIT was a grubby technological institute, beneath his rarefied taste. Nevertheless, he accepted the offer. Years later he would explain that he had contemplated suicide at the time but decided against it once he realized that attending MIT and killing himself didn’t
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