"You
could tell that human interaction was really difficult
for him, and there was no way of avoiding it at
Harvard. Harvard was an intensely social kind of place."
To ease the transition, Stallman fell back on his
strengths: math and science. Like most members of the
Science Honors Program, Stallman breezed through the
qualifying exam for Math 55, the legendary "boot camp"
class for freshman mathematics "concentrators" at
Harvard. Within the class, members of the Science
Honors Program formed a durable unit. "We were the math
mafia," says Chess with a laugh. "Harvard was nothing,
at least compared with the SHP."
To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess,
and the other SHP alumni had to get through Math 55.
Promising four years worth of math in two semesters,
the course favored only the truly devout. "It was an
amazing class," says David Harbater, a former "math
mafia" member and now a professor of mathematics at the
University of Pennsylvania. "It's probably safe to say
there has never been a class for beginning college
students that was that intense and that advanced.
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