I enjoyed mathematics from a very young age. At the beginning of college, I had this illusion, which was kind of silly in retrospect, that if I just understood math and physics and philosophy, I could figure out everything else from first principles.

One of the central mysteries of biology is why the genome is largely identical from cell to cell, even though cells do different things.

There was a period in my life when I was eating ramen non-stop. These days, less so. Once you have a kid, you end up eating a lot of foods with broccoli in them.

It's so hard to figure out what's going on in biological systems. You just can't see them.

Now we know that, the way contracts are set up, it's not really made for artists to get rich from selling records - that's the company's one shot to make money.

We are all used to paying a sales tax when we buy things - almost 9 percent here in New York City. The application of this concept to the financial sector could solve our need for revenue, bring some sanity back into the financial sector, and give us a way to raise the revenue we need to run the government in a fiscally responsible way.

I was convinced that the trading frequency measured a fundamental heartbeat of financial markets. Clearly it reflected the flow of information. It turns out also to be closely related to measures of liquidity.

I cannot and will not raise money on Benghazi. I also advise my colleagues to follow suit.