Early Life and Education
Kahn grew up in Paris, France, born to Jewish immigrants of modest means. His mother was an Auschwitz survivor, his father a mechanical engineer with a Socialist bent.
Kahn was educated in mathematics at ETH Zurich, Switzerland (Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute), and University of Nice, France. He received a masters in mathematics. He also majored in musicology and classical flute at the Zurich Music Conservatory in Switzerland. As a student, Kahn developed software for the MICRAL, the earliest non-kit personal computer based on a microprocessor. The MICRAL is now credited by the Computer History Museum as the first ever microprocessor-based personal computer.
Read more about this topic: Philippe Kahn
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said—the words one didn’t have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one’s dignity or survival.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)
“You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.”
—Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)