Early Life
Mann was brought up in Amherst, Massachusetts, where his father was a professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts (UMass). At school he was interested in math, science and computing. In 1983 he was prompted by seeing the film WarGames to write a rudimentary self-learning tic-tac-toe program which made random moves and listed losing moves which it would not repeat. Mann found a "trick" of using symmetry to reduce the number of unique moves to store so that the computer would not slow down so much.
In August 1984 he went to the University of California, Berkeley, to major in physics with a second major in applied math. His second year research in the theoretical behaviour of liquid crystals used the Monte Carlo method applying randomness in computer simulations. Late in 1987 he joined a research team under Didier de Fontaine which was using similar Monte Carlo methodology to investigate the superconducting properties of yttrium barium copper oxide, modelling transitions between ordered and disordered phases. He graduated with honors in 1989 with an A.B. in applied mathematics and physics.
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