EE professor wins the Big One for work in solid-state physics
Daniel C. Tsui, a professor of electrical engineering, last month won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of a fundamental property of electrons called the fractional quantum Hall effect. Tsui shares the $978,000 award with his codiscoverer Horst L. Störmer, of Columbia University and Bell Laboratories, and with Robert B. Laughlin, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University who provided the mathematical explanation for the effect.
The three winners were researchers at Bell Labs (now Lucent Technologies) in 1982, when the discovery was made. Tsui left later that year for Princeton, where he works with Professor of Electrical Engineering Stephen A. Lyon in solid-state physics, a field with applications in the manufacture of microchips. The 59-year-old Tsui holds the Arthur Legrand Doty Professorship of Electrical Engineering.
In a hastily prepared press conference in the Engineering Quadrangle on October 13, Tsui thanked the university for giving him a job that allows him to "do something fun, interesting, and challenging and still get paid."
The Hall effect, known to scientists since the 19th century, relates to the flow of electrons in a magnetic field. In 1980, German physicist Klaus von Klitzing experimented with electrons moving through silicon (the material of microchips); in a discovery that won him a 1985 Nobel Prize, he found that as he increased the magnetic field, the voltage of the electrons "jumped" from one voltage level to the next, with each step proportional to a whole number. Because the behavior of the electrons followed the laws of quantum mechanics, the phenomenon was dubbed the quantum Hall effect. Two years later, Tsui and Störmer discovered the "fractional" quantum Hall effect: working with extremely thin layers of gallium and arsenic sandwiched together and surrounded by a superstrong magnetic field and cooled to near absolute zero, they found that the voltage jumped not by whole numbers but by fractions.
Because sandwiches of gallium and arsenic conduct electrons much faster than silicon, they are contenders to replace silicon as the material for microchips. Tsui's work at Princeton focuses on understanding the basic physics of such alternative materials. Whether or not such research leads to practical applications, it's of interest to physicists groping for a deeper knowledge of the fundamental forces governing the universe.
Tsui is the 29th winner of the Nobel Prize associated with Princeton and the 18th Princetonian to win it in physics. He is the first winner associated with the Engineering School. Nobelists currently active on the faculty are Joseph H. Taylor (physics, 1993), Toni Morrison (literature, 1993), and Eric Wieschaus (physiology and medicine, 1995). Russell A. Hulse, who shared the 1993 Nobel in physics with Taylor, is a principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. John F. Nash *50 (economics, 1994) is a senior researcher in the Department of Mathematics.
Tsui's colleagues describe him as a shy, modest man embarrassed by the attention over the Nobel and totally devoted to his research. They say he routinely puts in 60-to-70-hour weeks in his lab. In response to the question inevitably asked at all Nobel press conferences, Tsui said he learned of the prize on the radio that morning and went to a scheduled off-campus appointment before heading into the office.
Tsui and his wife, Linda, have two grown daughters, Aileen and Judith; the latter is a 1991 graduate of Princeton. At the press conference Tsui was reluctant to talk about his personal life and left a departmental colleague, Sigurd Wagner, to fill in the details. He was born in Henan, China, in 1939, and grew up in a country ravaged by civil war. Orphaned at an early age, he was placed in the care of Lutheran missionaries. Recognizing his exceptional intellect, in 1958 they sent him to Augustina College, a Lutheran school in Rock Island, Illinois, outside Chicago. He graduated in 1961 with Phi Beta Kappa honors and went on to earn a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago in 1967. After a post-doctoral year at Chicago, he joined Bell Laboratories.
When Tsui and Störmer discovered the fractional quantum Hall effect, insiders recognized it might someday lead to a Nobel. Wagner bought a bottle of champagne 10 years ago in anticipation of that day. On October 13, surrounded by a grinning Tsui and his colleagues in the Engineering School, Wagner finally popped the cork.
Princeton's endowment aims for long-term growth
Forgive Andrew Golden if he is slightly preoccupied. As the president of the Princeton University Investment Company (Princo), his job is to select the external managers who invest Princeton's endowment -- which, in this market, is somewhat akin to juggling snakes. Witness Yale and Brown, which are reported to have invested in the Everest Capital hedge fund that lost $1.3 billion of the $2.7 billion it was managing this past year. Or Harvard, which after being up 20.5 percent in fiscal 1998, lost 10 percent of its endowment assets in July and August.
During those same two months, Princeton's endowment, which as of August 31 stood at $5.4 billion, dropped 6.7 percent -- not pleasant, but better than most. Golden says, "I don't know any other university with a large endowment that did better than we did." Still, he isn't gloating. Five months ago, reporters were calling his office to ask why the Princeton en-dowment was underperforming the runaway bull market. Today, those same reporters are asking Harvard's management company how it lost $1.4 billion. "Endowment managers are supposed to be long-term investors," Golden explains. "It's foolish to evaluate anyone based on several months' performance."
But the tough last several months have served as a warning for the college and university investment community, which had become accostomed to 20-percent annual gains over the past few years. Those returns were largely a function of the market, but the schools that did particularly well were also aided during the boom by a trend toward an increasingly aggressive investment strategy. The traditional view is that universities are very conservative investors, limiting themselves to "vanilla" domestic U.S. stocks and bonds (although Golden points out that endowments have always been more aggressive than pension funds.) For a school like Princeton, which relies on its endowment for close to 30 percent of its annual budget, discretion was the better part of valor. The goal was to grow at a rate fast enough to feed the budget and cover inflation -- while remaining prudent enough that the university would never have to touch the principal.
Over the past few years, however, many universities, buoyed by the strong market, have been willing to accept a higher level of risk. The stakes are large -- an endowment that grows faster than inflation means more money and more resources to educate future students. And, for many schools, the payoff has been large. Before its recent loss, Harvard's endowment had swelled by $7.6 billion over the preceding five years to $13 billion at the end of fiscal year 1998. Many of those gains came from large returns in areas not traditionally considered the province of endowments: arbitrage, hedge funds, closed-end funds, and emerging markets. While Princeton may have been more conservative in these areas than Harvard, it also played the game. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, during 1997 Princeton "twice entered into swap and futures contracts in an attempt to shift $750 million of investment exposure from U.S. to international markets."
Golden concedes that Princo has invested a sizable amount of the endowment in hedge funds and emerging markets, but he disputes the idea -- currently fashionable in the financial press -- that universities have been burned by their moves into these areas. "Plenty of people lost money the old fashioned way in August," he says. "Harvard may have lost 10 percent, but the U.S. market was down 15 percent." And although it may have been a combination of luck and circumspection that kept Princeton out of recent disasters such as Everest Capital, Princo doesn't feel that the ratio of risk to reward in these investments has changed. "At present," Golden says, "I feel very comfortable with the level of risk we are taking."
OTHER CHANGES
In addition to adding these new types of investments, Princo has continued its move toward small-cap stocks. Princo subscribes to the theory that while it is hard to consistently beat the market among the larger stocks, Princeton can thrive by investing in less widely followed areas. These include, among other things, smaller public and private companies. (Princeton invests in private companies exclusively through Nassau Capital, an investment firm founded by former Princo president Randall Hack '69.) "We have a healthy respect for the efficiency of markets," Golden says, "but we also realize that some are less efficient."
In those less efficient markets, Princeton has several competitive advantages when trying to find good buys. First, as Golden says, "We're large enough to cost-effectively support market research, yet not so large that smaller opportunities can't have a meaningful impact." Additionally, when it comes to both research and investment expertise, Princeton is both able and willing to draw upon its large number of alumni in the investment community. Indeed, Golden describes the collective wisdom of the alumni who serve on the Princo board as a "secret weapon." All of these factors are important in minimizing risk -- as one trustee says, "We don't want to play any game where we don't have an unfair advantage."
Yet during August's declines, even investments that Princeton had viewed as bargains lost value. The reason, Golden explains, is that "the rational investor suffers in both market extremes: the exuberant market and the precipitously down market." He argues that the fundamentals of these smaller companies in which Princeton has invested are strong, and that eventually rational investors will realize that fact and bid the prices back up. "While the excess volatility of current markets can hurt short-term results," Golden claims, "in the end we have to believe that fundamental values will win out."
Still, despite Princo's faith in the long-term, the company does also adjust Princeton's balance of funds based on its perception of market trends. For some time, Princo, like many money managers, thought the market was overvalued. Unlike many managers, however, Princo made adjustments before the downturn, going underweight in the U.S. market and, more recently, overweight in hedge funds. The move paid off during August, when the hedge funds in which Princeton invested were down only 4 percent, helping minimize the damage.
As for the future, while Golden thinks the market is still overvalued, he isn't predicting a crash. "We didn't expect August," he says, "but we're not panicked at this point. The world is riskier today than it was a year ago -- but not that much riskier. People just recognize the risk now."
-- Wes Tooke '98
Annals of Teaching:
Why do I enjoy teaching Chinese?
We senior faculty enjoy research. It's fun to study questions we find interesting, and, having earned tenure and waited out seniority, we expect it is our turn to set our own agendas. Hence we seek to minimize our teaching "load." We prefer to teach small groups of graduate students who share our interests, and in undergraduate teaching we favor the more advanced courses.
So why does someone like me, primarily a scholar of literature and cultural history, teach beginning Chinese language -- not every year, but most? Why, as a senior professor, do I descend into the chalk, the tapes, the piles of daily homework, and the scheduling maze? What's in it for me, or for the other two senior professors in my department who also teach beginning Chinese?
I teach beginning Chinese because I find the work itself rewarding. I enjoy the sense of achievement at the end of a school year. When freshmen arrive in September they can't say a thing in Chinese; by May they can get along in the language, and in most cases are headed toward true mastery. I can point to them and say, 'Look what I did!' The teaching process resembles gardening: you get your hands in the dirt, plant some seeds, add fertilizer, pull up weeds (correct mistakes) and eventually get results.
I find such palpable results to be much more elusive when I teach advanced courses in literature. I may feel clear, indeed passionate, about what I want to convey in such courses, but what I actually convey is usually hard to say. Literary texts are highly complex, and students' responses are often unpredictable. To teach exactly what one intends to teach is about as possible as herding cats. Ultimately, only the teacher quite understands what the teacher has meant to say. I am reminded of a "Snoopy" cartoon, published many years ago, in which Charlie Brown reports his teacher's view that "teaching is like bowling -- all you can do is roll the ball down the middle and hope for the best."
The presence of "right answers" in language teaching -- compared to their nonexistence in literary matters -- affords the language teacher the satisfaction of feeling that the fruits of one's effort will be useful to the world. In both my fields, literary studies and China studies, the ground has been well trampled in partisan ideological struggles. The language classroom is a natural harbor from such strife, as well as a workshop that is equally helpful to all combatants. In beginning Chinese, the right answers are the same for both left and right, postmodernists and their debunkers, critics and defenders of the Chinese government, and so on. The language teacher can instruct everyone, confident that the world will be better off when your 65 bright young Americans, whatever their beliefs, are able to communicate accurately with Chinese people. The good in your results is thus "above" ideology in roughly the same sense that, if you are a gardener, the good in having grown healthy pumpkins will survive questions of what kinds of people eat them.
It's a truism in the study of any human culture that language is the gateway to understanding, but for languages as different as Chinese and English, this truth is especially important. There are some ways in which the Chinese and English languages conceive the rudiments of things quite differently. For example, all nouns in Chinese are by nature collective, like "sugar" or "water" in English. To speak of particulars we say "a lump of sugar" or "a cup of water," but in Chinese a similar thing happens with all nouns. The Chinese word for "human being," by itself, is neither singular nor plural but something like "humanity." To say "a person," one says -- putting it very literally -- "one individuation of humanity" (except that in Chinese this takes only three syllables, not 12). In Chinese you can make it clear that your reference is either singular or plural, definite or indefinite, but you do not have to, as in English. Taking full stock of this difference sheds light not only on "the Chinese mind" but on the unexamined assumptions of the Western one. It is a real pleasure to teach these points to beginners, and I feel that beginning Chinese will be for them, as it was for me, a crucial undergirding for everything else they will ever study about China.
In the end, I teach Chinese simply because I like the language. I enjoy its sounds, and I find its grammatical puzzles interesting. As I write this, I am midway through teaching beginning Chinese for the 20th time in my career, and each time I teach it, I happen across many new insights into Chinese grammar and concepts. These insights emerge, in part, from the continual effort to figure out how best to explain things to a beginner. I also learn from colleagues with whom I serve on teaching teams. We meet weekly to plan lessons, and often find that the meetings exceed their time limits because we have not finished arguing a grammar point. The marvelous complexity of Chinese (or any language) induces humility when one teaches it 19 times and still finds a dozen ways in which it could have been taught better.
-- Perry Link
The writer is a professor of East Asian studies. A longer version of this article appeared in the spring 1998 issue of the newsletter of the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning.