I was graduated from City College of New York in 1935 after majoring in physics and mathematics. In my early years in college I was stimulated by my teachers Irving Lowen and Mark Zemansky. From both I learned to appreciate clarity and precision in thinking. I believe I owe to Zemansky the opportunity of entering the Princeton Graduate School in 1935. I suppose he wrote good letters of recommendation to the Princeton Admission Committee and to the General Electric Company's board of advisors for their Charles A. Coffin Foundation Fellowship. I had the Coffin Fellowship for the year 1935–6, and a stipulation of that fellowship was that I had to be involved in research, even in my first year of graduate study. This condition weighed pretty heavily on me, and as a result of advice from Harry Smyth, then chairman of the Physics Department, I started working with Louis Ridenour on a Wilson cloud-chamber project. Earlier, I had given some theoretical assistance to Walker Bleakney in his design of a new mass spectrograph operating on a cycloidal trajectory principle. Because of the time I spent on research, I really had much less time than I wanted for course work, in particular in the quantum mechanics course I took from Eugene Wigner.

In my second year, now with an assistantship to E. U. Condon, I really tried hard to become a theorist. I was strongly influenced by Condon, and now that I can think back about it, I should have been.