Nash

9 Pages 2210 Words

od memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house which was located rather centrally in Bluefield.

A sister, Martha, was born about two and a half years later than me on November 16, 1930.

I went to the standard schools in Bluefield but also to a kindergarten before starting in the elementary school level. And my parents provided an encyclopedia, Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia, that I learned a lot from by reading it as a child. And also there were other books available from either our house or the house of the grandparents that were of educational value.

Bluefield, a small city in a comparatively remote geographical location in the Appalachians, was not a community of scholars or of high technology. It was a center of businessmen, lawyers, etc. that owed its existence to the railroad and the rich nearby coal fields of West Virginia and western Virginia. So, from the intellectual viewpoint, it offered the sort of challenge that one had to learn from the world's knowledge rather than from the knowledge of the immediate community.

By the time I was a student in high school I was reading the classic "Men of Mathematics" by E. T. Bell and I remember succeeding in proving the classic Fermat theorem about an integer multiplied by itself p times where p is a prime.

I also did electrical and chemistry experiments at that time. At first, when asked in school to prepare an essay about my career, I prepared one about a career as an electrical engineer like my father. Later, when I actually entered Carnegie Tech. in Pittsburgh I entered as a student with the major of chemical engineering.

Regarding the circumstances of my studies at Carnegie (now Carnegie Mellon U.), I was lucky to be there on a full scholarship, called the George Westinghouse Scholarship. But after one semester as a chem. eng. student I reacted negatively to the regimentation of courses such as mechanical drawing and shifte...