Armando Solar-Lezama: Academic success despite an inauspicious start
When Armando Solar-Lezama was a third grader in Mexico City, his science class did a unit on electrical circuits. The students were divided into teams of three, and each team member had to bring in a light bulb, a battery, or a switch. Solar-Lezama, whose father worked for an electronics company, volunteered to provide the switch. Using electrical components his father had brought home from work, Solar-Lezama built a “flip-flop” circuit and attached it to a touch-sensitive field effect transistor. When the circuit was off, touching the transistor turned it on, and when it was on, touching the transistor turned it off. “I was pretty proud of my circuit,” says Solar-Lezama, now an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science. By the time he got to school, however, one of his soldered connections had come loose, and the circuit’s performance was erratic. “They failed the whole group,” Solar-Lezama says. “And everybody...