A BEAUTIFUL
MIND
dealing with the same problem:
after four or five hours building
games on the store machine, he’d
be kicked out and all his work
vanished. He took this inconvenience as a challenge to perfect
his code so that he could re-enter
it in the fewest possible steps.
This fastidious dedication to
simple, streamlined programming
stayed with him, and he would
later require his students to write
straightforward, elegant code.
When not sitting at a screen,
Thrun sang in a five-person choir
with Petra Dierkes, a girl two years
HUFFINGTON
8.19.12
his junior who would become his
girlfriend when he was 18, and,
eventually, his wife and colleague
at Stanford University. He also
played the piano, improvising his
own songs as a way to study and
express his emotions.
Thrun was a gifted student and
terrible pupil with a self-imposed
homework ban that lasted from
seventh grade through high school
graduation. In college, the unprecedented freedom to choose his
own coursework sparked a newfound passion for his academic
work. He combined a major in
computer science with an unorthodox double minor in medicine
and economics, a combination
Thrun is
pictured here
in October of
2007 with
the rest of
the Carnegie
Mellon
University
team working
on the
“Groundhog,”
a robot which
traverses
mines too
toxic for
humans
to enter.