Early Life and Education
Thorp's father, Herbert Holden "Herb" Thorp (d. 1996), was a native of Rocky Mount, North Carolina. He was an attorney who earned an undergraduate degree from UNC in 1954 and a law degree - also from UNC - in 1956. His mother, Olga "Bo" Thorp (née Bernardin, b. 1933), a 1956 UNC graduate, is a native of Columbia, South Carolina; her parents were Italian immigrants who died when she was 15. Both of Thorp's parents were involved in creating Fayetteville Little Theater, now known as the Cape Fear Regional Theater, in 1962. Herb Thorp was its first president, and Bo Thorp was its creative director for 50 years until stepping down in April 2012.
Thorp's parents moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1960, and Thorp was born there on August 16, 1964. He spent much of his youth involved with the theater, performing in productions led by his mother, and met his future wife, Patti Worden, in 1974 at the theater. He attended St. Patrick Catholic School, a private middle school. He is remembered as a good student who finished the algebra textbook by Thanksgiving, and a geometry book the following Easter.
In the summer of 1981, at age 17, while studying guitar at Boston's Berklee College of Music, Thorp won first place and a $500 prize in a northeast regional competition to solve a Rubik's Cube puzzle. His motivation for entering the competition was to earn money to buy jazz records. Winning the competition also earned him a trip to the national competition, which was aired on the television program That's Incredible! He placed fifth in that national competition, and again won first place in a regional competition the following year, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
After graduating from Terry Sanford High School in 1982, Thorp attended the only university he had applied to, the University of North Carolina. He was a pre-medical student initially, and later turned to chemistry and academia, earning a BS degree in 1986. He completed doctoral work in three years (instead of the normal five) at the California Institute of Technology in 1989, earning a Ph.D under Harry B. Gray at the age of 24. He completed post-doctoral work at Yale in 1990.
In 1991, Thorp began teaching as an associate professor of chemistry at North Carolina State University.
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