Features

Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Q1: What attracted you to computers? What was the first interesting program you wrote?

Jon Kleinberg

Kleinberg: I've always been interested in mathematics, and I discovered computers when I first used an Apple II around sixth or seventh grade. At school, we all used them to play games, and the temptation quickly developed to try writing our own variations on the games. So these were the first interesting programs I wrote -- text-adventure games, games that used the simple graphics features, things like that. In a funny way, the limited power of personal computers then made it possible to feel like you were really using the machine to its full potential, even if in retrospect one can see all the additional subtleties that were hiding in the background.

The evolution of information technology over the past few decades has been so fast that you can look at professional computer scientists who differ in age by very little, and discover that their formative experiences with computers were radically different. It slices the age groups into micro-generations that I think helps give the field some of its great diversity of perspectives on problems. And by now, of course, you have freshman entering college who were four years old when the Mosaic browser appeared.

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