People

I remember the moment at Los Alamos,NM when someone introduced the quiet man at the lunch table to me as "This is Metropolis." So many thoughts went through my head! I remember this was immediately after my thesis work on myraid problems, and I was on the lookout for new problems and directions to define my research career. Historically, coincidentally, it seems people like me ended up at Los Alamos/Santa Fe, something about the New Mexican desert. This is all beautifully described in Mike Waterman's prose-ode: Skiing the Sun. These days I work on adwords auctions and game theory, a new area for me. I got to meet Hal Varian who gave me a puzzle from his thesis. More on that later. His non-academic writing is quite interesting too!