Word: botts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Much of Bott's own unorthodox youth was spent avoiding educational systems that emphasized rote learning. Born in Budapest on September 24, 1923, to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, he lived the first 16 years of his life in the Hungarian part of Slovakia. His parents divorced soon after he was born, but Bott nonetheless led a childhood of affluence, since his new stepfather was a high-ranking manager in a sugar factory...
Until the age of eight, Bott was educated by governesses in arithmetic, German and English at his Hungarian-speaking home. When he became eight, Bott says he was unhappily sent off to elementary school. School was not his forte, as he write in his memoirs...
Until he discovered his love for mathematics, his attitude toward school continued to be indifferent. As a teenage refugee from Hitler, and then as a transient English boarding school student, Bott recalls shingling stables and pursuing his interest in electrical fuses more than attending classes...
...Bott received his first rigorous education when he arrived in Canada for a year of high school after skipping two years and being elevated to his senior year for answering a trick mathematics question correctly. But only after graduating as an electrical engineer from McGill University would his talent in mathematics come to the forefront...
Samit Dasgupta '99, who as a first year took Bott's introductory topology class and is currently taking Bott's differential geometry class, says he believes Bott is preoccupied with large issues as opposed to the details...