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Paradigms treated as bedrock for generations are overturned, sometimes overnight, often by observations of such apparent simplicity that they’re overlooked by even a field’s most thoughtful luminaries—setting the stage for an outsider to change everything.
Hubel and Wiesel’s epiphany was that perception doesn’t occur in a single layer of neurons, but across many, organized in a hierarchy that begins with the recognition of superficial details and ends with complex, high-level awareness.
Hubel and Wiesel’s work transformed the way we think about sensory perception, earning the duo a Nobel Prize in 1981.
Although the algorithm was powerful and versatile, its architecture was so complex that it couldn’t be practically trained using the methods developed for its simpler predecessors, which lacked the neocognition’s densely connected inner layers.
They called it “backpropagation,” named for its defining feature: a cascading effect in which each instance of training—specifically, the degree to which a network’s response to a given stimulus is correct or incorrect—ripples from one end to the other, layer by layer.
My father was studying everything in sight, and I found myself studying him.
But I had obsessions of my own, and I didn’t begrudge him his.
When he finally returned, after what must have been an especially lonely convalescence recovering from a broken nose and concussion, it was immediately clear that the boy we knew was gone.
documents like the Bill of Rights echoed the phrases I heard my mother whisper in the months leading up to my father’s departure in 1989.
To an ESL student, every class is an English class.
As the months stretched on, we began to make room for a new tradition as well, dedicating some of our weekend time to exploring the state, a routine that once brought us to the campus of Princeton University, located a bit more than an hour south.
I practically shivered with each word, as if a fever were breaking.
But face-to-face with a monument to my greatest hero, I could feel it returning.
I had something to chase again.
It was a natural instinct; grades are a well-established target for immigrants desperate to secure some hope of a future worth wanting.
Whereas teachers in Chengdu seemed to want little more than for me to blend in, I began to sense Mr. Sabella was challenging me in a different way. He wanted me to stand out. No one owes you anything, he seemed to be saying. If you want an A so badly, you can work harder for it next time.
And he was a true connoisseur of the discipline, with a sprawling collection of textbooks and reference volumes that created a rainbow of colored spines facing outward from every wall.
Ironically, being an ESL student made it easy for me to speak up. I continued to need so many words and English-language concepts explained that isolated questions became an ongoing dialogue.
“Do you know who Arthur C. Clarke is? He’s one of my favorite science fiction authors. I think you might like him, too.”
“Yes! Yes! Juh-les … uh … Vern-ah,” I repeated, clumsily, with a laugh. “I cannot pronounce his name, but I love his books!” His eyes lit up. As I’d later learn, Mr. Sabella was a lifelong sci-fi buff, and a Jules Verne fan in particular.
I believe it was the first moment an American had ever seen me as more than a Chinese-speaking immigrant.
As my reading expanded, so did his; on my recommendation, he read through Chinese classics like Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Journey to the West. But none of it was a distraction from my studies. If anything, by helping me to think more holistically, he reminded me that there’s joy to be found in learning.
Likewise, I appreciated his patience; earning an immigrant’s trust can be a delicate task, but his dedication won me over.
The child of Italian immigrants who mocked his bookish disposition and love for science fiction, he felt like an outcast even among his own siblings.
For her, after everything she’d gambled, it was a relief I don’t think I’ll ever fully appreciate.
I’d spent an idyllic childhood in China’s middle class, an adolescence in American poverty, learned a second language—more or less, anyway—and, with my recent acquisition of a green card, taken a step toward citizenship. At the same time, I’d lived in an immigrant community full of bright, hardworking people who’d never climbed a rung on the ladder of economic fortune.
As an immigrant, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was expected—obligated, even—to treat my scholarship as an economic lifeline: an entrée into a lucrative field like medicine, finance, or engineering, and thus an escape from life at society’s margins.
It was a support that never made sense to anyone but us—certainly not the friends we’d made in Parsippany’s community of immigrants, who saw my decision as a wasted lottery ticket—but it was enough.
He lowered the lights, projected the now famous photo of the Hubble Telescope’s deep field imaging of the distant universe, and spoke to us with a voice so resonant it felt like a call from the depths of the cosmos.
Although Mr. Sabella didn’t personally know of any way around the cost of the operation, the situation came up in conversation a few weeks later with a fellow faculty member—my high school art teacher—whose neighbor knew of a care facility called Deborah Heart and Lung Center.
Years of reacting had instilled in us a hunger to stand up and take an action of our own.
We’d also be able to borrow from the friends we’d made in New Jersey’s immigrant community, assuming our venture generated at least some revenue.
A local dry-cleaning shop was for sale, and the more we considered it, the more perfect it seemed.
It was the kind of environment where my father’s aptitude for machines might finally come in handy.
And money wasn’t all we’d amassed over the years; we’d formed
a modest network of contacts as well—friends, neighbors, and employers, many of whom were fellow immigrants from China my father had met early on.
She was the daughter of a Kuomintang family, born on the wrong side of the Cultural Revolution and plunged into a lifelong exile of the mind. Now, she was the friendliest face in New Jersey dry cleaning.
Finally, we (or, more precisely, I) achieved a dry-cleaning rite of passage—destroying a cashmere sweater—adding our heftiest penalty yet to the pile.
Although we wouldn’t realize this until much later, we’d lucked out on both timing and location: the economy was booming during the second half of the 1990s, and our store just happened to face the bus stop that connected Parsippany to Lower Manhattan.
made the thought of failing—of letting them down—all the harder to bear.
Realizing that dry cleaning is a fairly low-margin business but that alterations are a lucrative exception, she began offering the service to our customers—undaunted, evidently, by her almost complete lack of experience.
I never joined one of the school’s famous eating clubs, nor did I ever quite
tap into that networking instinct that so many Ivy League students seemed to naturally possess.
So I packed my schedule as densely as I could, immersing myself in math and physics, scouring corkboard advertisements for lectures and workshops, and checking out stacks of books from the library.
I had no business there, obviously, but the events weren’t strictly private, and I’d occasionally run into a grad student I could chat with
I kept reading in the meantime, with an ever-growing interest in the minds behind the ideas that had so captured my imagination. I devoured biographies of thinkers like Einstein, Feynman, and Bohr, studying their histories as intently as my own coursework.
One after another, the greatest figures in physics seemed to develop an unexpected late-career interest in the mystery of life itself, even taking abrupt shifts toward the formal study of biology.
My reading list grew more and more eclectic. I dove into Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and was swept away by the range and depth of Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind.
They were, in other words, my introduction to the philosophical implications of computation. It wasn’t until college that I realized how many of my peers had grown up with computers.
At the start of the next quarter, I enrolled in my first computer science class.
