Changes

I started playing chess seriously, I guess, when I was in high school. I played chess so much that it affected my grades in college. One year I played chess to the exclusion of everything else and woke up at the end of the term and discovered I had failed two courses. I was going to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_College_of_New_York City College] at the time. I failed a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics physics] course and a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics math] course — theory of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_of_a_real_variable functions of real variables]. It was quite a shock and I gave up chess after that term. I suppose I continued reading about it, but I stopped playing chess. Then in graduate school, although I’d given up math for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_literature medieval literature] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_poetry poetry], I worked as an assistant in the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_engineering civil engineering] department. After that I went into the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army army], and because of my work at [[Columbia University|Columbia]] and what I was doing in the army — working in a special research and development outfit of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Corps_(United_States_Army) Signal Corps—ICorps] , I became acquainted with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer computers] and what they could do.