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Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro: How did you become interested in computers?

Seth Grimes: To be precise, I'm interested in programming rather than in computers.

For someone like me, programming is a captivating activity and it helps you do challenging things. For example, when I was in high school, in 1976, one of the calculus teachers, not mine, offered an A to any student who could compute 1,000 factorial, the product of the integers from 1 to 1,000. One of my bonehead friends started multiplying on paper so I programmed it. This was in Basic on an HP minicomputer with 16-bit arithmetic and a minuscule amount of memory. I got my program to run in 2 minutes, using log approximations for error checking. It was fun and it showed up my friend. What more could you ask for, aside from getting paid to do this kind of stuff?

I suppose I prefer computing over abstract challenges because you can see your results. Textual analysis is especially concrete because it deals with human language and I find a certain appeal in deciphering and deconstructing text.

I'll blame my need for concrete problems for my neglect of my grad school math work. So I was reading stuff like The Sot-Weed Factor and Gravity's Rainbow when I should have been studying commutative rings. Clever stuff, but reading about a character named Sammy Hilbert-Spaess does not make you king of infinite space despite his name.

At least I did learn about linear algebra and vector spaces, which help if you want to understand techniques applied in text analytics, stuff like singular value decompositions.

GPS: What do you like to do when away from a computer?

SG: My second job is (volunteer) president of a public-safety non-profit in the community where I live, and I'm involved in a slew of other local activities. I even ran for mayor of the city where I live, Takoma Park, Maryland, which is next to Washington DC, back in 2005. I got 41% of the vote but lost to an entrenched, eight-year encumbent. Fortunately the mayor who beat me stepped down in 2007, and fortunately I think I have running for office out of my system.

Otherwise, I have an inherited love of travel, I spend time with my family, and I leyn every month or two. Leyning is public Torah reading, a learning exercise that actually gets me involved in a tradition of close textual analysis.

GPS: What book are you currently reading?

SG: I'm just about done Vineland by Thomas Pynchon and I'm part-way done Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad. I don't read business books and I only occasionally read technical books.