Dante Loretta

I was also studying math and physics.

I actually started out in theoretical math.

I didn't really know what I wanted to do.

And at the time I was kind of exploring my own mind, human consciousness, the limits of human knowledge, you know, I dabbled with philosophy, was very quickly talked out of majoring in that just for practical reasons.

But theoretical math seemed kind of like on the boundary between you could go get a job afterwards and you could also do some really crazy exploration of how the human mind works.

And then I slowly migrated over to physics because I wanted to understand, well, the fun thing about theoretical math is that you can develop logical constructs entirely contained within the human mind that have no application to the physical universe.

And I thought that was just fascinating that you

But you can also, of course, create all kinds of constructs that very, very accurately describe how the universe works.

And that's the language of science is mathematics.

And so I always looked at my study of math as the study of a language.

And if you want to describe very precisely how the universe operates, then mathematics is the language that's required to do that.

So I moved into physics and started to learn how to actually speak the language of science by applying that math degree.

But I also had a requirement to take a foreign language.

That was kind of the general education requirement.

Four semesters with foreign language was required.

And this was in the 80s, and we thought Japan was going to rule the world.

They were buying all the real estate in Manhattan.

The Japanese corporations were big, and the economy was booming.

And I wanted a challenge for one thing.

I wanted to understand how another culture that's very different than my background and my knowledge and my experience, how they thought, how they communicated, how they spoke.