My Life as a Quant by Emanuel Derman Page B

nearby hotel. As we arrived, my father-in-law somberly announced to us that a small bomb had exploded in one of the physics department’s bathrooms. Without a moment’s hesitation Chang-Li and I leapt in the air for joy, whooping and cheering. My in-laws looked at us in bewilderment, and I suddenly realized how far beyond the elastic limit we had been stretched.
    I had waited four years to begin my thesis work, but once I knew enough to get going, I progressed steadily. Halfway through the research I gave a seminar on some of my early results to T. D. and the rest of the departmental faculty. In early 1972 I finally published my first paper, in which I used Feynman’s parton model to try to explain the results of a recent Columbia experiment carried out by Leon Lederman and collaborators. My calculation was simply a warm-up exercise for the thesis work to come, but its publication and the sight of my name in print after so many years of waiting exhilarated me briefly. I completed my thesis research by late 1972 and, at long last, in the spring of 1973, formally defended my work in front of a committee consisting of T. D. himself, Christ, and Lederman. I answered their questions and then I was done.
    My thesis, Tests for a Weak Neutral Current in l   ± + N → l   ± + Anything , was published in 1973 in the Physical Review . It was a competent piece of work that analyzed how the then-unverified standard model of weak and electromagnetic forces would uniquely manifest itself through parity violation in electron-proton scattering. In 1978, a collaboration led by Charles Prescott and Richard Taylor at SLAC published the results of an elegant and careful experiment that confirmed a level of parity violation consistent with the standard model. A recent book on the history of twentieth-century particle physics 1 refers to the audience’s prolonged applause after Prescott’s first presentation of their experimental results as “the long elegiac salute given to the end of an age.” Their experiment put the final stamp of approval on the standard model of Glashow, Weinberg, and Salam. I was pleased to note that my 1973 paper was one of the first papers they referenced.
    Despite the amount of time it took to finish my thesis, I have no real regrets; in a way, I am proud of the struggle. What I learned in those years—perseverance as much as mathematics—has stood me in good stead on Wall Street as well as in academia. When trying to discover something new in any field, one has to spend many years thinking, making false starts, wandering down blind alleys and stumbling into ditches, only to emerge again and keep going. For this, a PhD is a good, if painful, training.
    Years later on Wall Street I was horrified to notice quant résumés listing the nonexistent degree A.B.D. That, I soon discovered, was a common business-world acronym for “All But Dissertation,” a way of describing those who had tried to obtain a PhD but left academia before they had completed their dissertation. Since a PhD is by definition a research degree, the main achievement of which is the completion of a piece of original research described in a dissertation, I looked at A.B.D. as a kind of “Wayne’s World” PhD (not!). I resented the way it devalued the innovation and effort involved in doing research.
    I then began the search for a postdoctoral position, a two-year, low-paying research appointment that was the standard first step towards an academic career in science. I mailed out scores of letters with my curriculum vitae to physicists whose names I knew. I gave research seminars at any of the schools that invited me. But academic jobs were scarce—the universities were filled to the brim with young, tenured faculty hired during the past decade; I might well have to wait for a generation of physicists to die.
    As in most endeavors, it helps to have someone pulling for you. At