Free My Life as a Quant by Emanuel Derman

of required courses, all the while continuing my quest for a particle physics thesis advisor. Finally, in early 1969 I reached an agreement to work for Norman Christ. He was the most recent in the long line of T. D.’s wunderkinder , a polite and enthusiastically perky young man who was just about my age, but who had received his PhD under T. D.’s tutelage in record time two years earlier, before I had even arrived at Columbia. After two years as a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he had returned to Columbia as a tenured associate professor. In terms of a career, he seemed to have everything one could hope for. It must have been a heavy burden, however, to carry the weight of so many expectations of precociousness. I was relieved, many years later, to hear him uncharacteristically comment that a physicist spends about half of his or her time enthralled and the other half in depression, an observation that corresponded closely to my own experience.
    I was Norman’s first PhD student and, perhaps because he had been a student so recently himself, our relations were stilted. During the four years I worked for him he never succeeded in finding a comfortable mode of addressing me. I suppose that the difficulty arose from the tension between the parity of our ages and the disparity of our relative positions. He could not bring himself to simply call me “Emanuel” and so he eventually resorted to addressing me as “Mr. Derman,” uttered between invisible quote marks in a manner intended to imply ironic jocosity. I, in turn, could never manage to call him “Norman.” It was only with my father- and mother-in-law that I ever again experienced a similar sort of naming difficulty: The first names they told me to use seemed to connote too much familiarity, “Dr.” and “Mrs.” seemed too formal, and the Slovak analogs of “Mom” and “Dad” that my wife used were too unnatural. In the end, with them though not with Norman, first names prevailed.
    In the fall of 1968, I moved out of I. House to share an apartment with a friend on Amsterdam Avenue and 120th Street, just across the street from where I now teach financial engineering. With most of my foreign friends from the previous two years back in their home countries, I spent much time alone. One evening I experienced my first mugging at the hands of a group of teenagers, with two more muggings to follow over the next few years. But, on the plus side, sometime in the spring of 1969, I noticed a new and exotic foreign female student in the physics department library. Since women in physics were rare, a new arrival attracted everyone’s attention. Though I hadn’t yet contrived to meet her, I watched from a distance her laughter-filled gesticulating conversations with some of the other graduate students. Then, one Saturday evening, I saw her at a fellow student’s party on 119th Street. I approached her and learned that her name was Eva. She had left Czechoslovakia for a summer job in Germany during the Prague Spring of 1968 and, after the Russian invasion, had not returned. Her English was charmingly limited; I felt sad to see the skimpy physics lecture notes she had jotted down in Slovak during physics classes that were delivered in English. When I walked her home from the party we discovered that we both lived in the same apartment building on 120th Street. Soon we were spending much of our time together.
    I spent the summer of 1969 at a particle physics summer school at Brookhaven National Laboratories in Upton, Long Island. Most weekends I headed back into the city to see Eva; sometimes she came out to Brookhaven to visit me. We went swimming in the rough surf off Smith Point, in Atlantic Ocean waves of a size I hadn’t seen since I had left Cape Town. But mostly the summer weeks dragged by slowly and yet unquietly on dreary Long Island, until finally, at summer’s end, I