His life was fascinating. He was Jewish, and he remained in occupied France during World War II, narrowly averting many roundups and mass executions. Rarely did he take notes, relying instead on an excellent memory. He also spent a considerable portion of his life involved in politics and pacifism, helping end wars and free dissidents in repressed countries.

Schwartz had a strong love for Vietnam and visited often. On one of these trips, he met a model student:

Vietnamese students are generally very studious. Once, in a large deserted street of Hanoi, towards midnight, I was passing in a car and I saw a student installed in the middle of the sidewalk, sitting on a chair in front of a table covered with papers, under the light of a big street lamp; he had chosen this unusual spot because he had no electricity at home.

His research was on distributions, not the statistical ones but the ones that generalize functions. He speaks at length on the ups and downs he encountered in his research, and laments that the history of science is not taught more. Without a historical perspective, young folks get the false impression that knowledge comes quickly and easily:

This alternation of joy and suffering is at the heart of research. Young people need to get used to it. High school students all too often think that it isn’t normal to think about a problem for more than an hour, whereas to find something really important, it’s necessary to think for several days, if not months, and even years… When you read a well-written book, you don’t think about the joys and suffering of the author who wrote it. It can be quite instructive to learn about them.

In his youth, he didn’t think his mind was particularly special. His thoughts remind me of my own education:

In spite of my success, I was always deeply uncertain about my own intellectual capacity; I thought I was unintelligent. And it is true that I was, and still am, rather slow. I need time to seize things because I always need to understand them fully. Even when I was the first to answer the teacher’s questions, I knew it was because they happened to be questions to which I already knew the answer. But if a new question arose, usually students who weren’t as good as I was answered before me.

Schwartz goes on:

Towards the end of the eleventh grade, I secretly thought of myself as stupid. I worried about this for a long time. Not only did I believe I was stupid, but I couldn’t understand the connection between this stupidity and my good grades. I never talked about this to anyone, but I always felt convinced that my imposture would someday be revealed: the whole world and myself would finally see that what looked like intelligence was really just an illusion. If this ever happened, apparently no one noticed it, and I’m still just as slow.

Like Schwartz, I’ve got a nagging case of impostor syndrome.

On being asked what he believed to be his greatest achievement, Walt said:

“Building an organization and holding it.”

How I’ve longed to work side-by-side with scientists and designers to make things! Walt did too:

“The ideal setup would be the storyman, the director, and the layout man, as well as the musician, operating as a sort of story unit. They should all be keenly interested in the picture. No one person should dominate to an extent where he would keep the others from entering into the production and freely expressing themselves.”

“Everyone has to contribute, or they become laborers.”

‎Animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson described Walt as someone who kept a constant eye on his audience, refusing to turn inward:

“For some reason, he had a distrust of engineers as men who designed primarily for themselves without regard to the intended use of the product, and he refused to have anyone on the staff with the title ‘engineer.'”

Walt was simple:

“I don’t know if it’s art, but I know I like it.”

“I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, especially laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with ‘expressing’ myself with obscure creative impressions.”

“Money—or rather the lack of it to carry out my ideas—may worry me, but it does not excite me.”

“You know, the only way I’ve found to make these pictures is with animators—you can’t seem to do it with accountants and bookkeepers.”

I went to my local library to get some Disney DVDs. They were all checked out.