The young man awakens and puts on his karate robe. What鈥檚 left of his dinner from last night, a plate of Pad Thai made from scratch, sits on a desk not too far away. He had picked at the meal late into the night as he researched programming languages and then, just for fun, pondered Doob鈥檚 martingale convergence theorems:
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This morning, before plowing back into his work, and maybe the rest of the Pad Thai, he does his usual warm-up exercises, involving Shotokan Karate, which has as its creed: We train our body to be strong, and our mind and spirit to be patient, in order to become the best human beings we can be. The exercises almost always stimulate a cascade of different ideas for how he should approach his work.
The research of , creating automated software re-engineering tools, sounds esoteric. But then he mentions the Y2K scare, when individuals, companies, and organizations worldwide had to check, fix, and upgrade their computer systems at the turn of the century. He wants to prevent those kinds of crippling events that could surface in the future. He believes in his research so strongly that he has decided to work on it full-time rather than be a fourth-year student at 麻豆村.
His mom, Sue Koppel, isn鈥檛 surprised. There was something about her son, even when he was a baby growing up in St. Louis, Mo. She recalls when he was just 18 months old, he provided some startling entertainment for friends, family, and whoever else visited the Koppel household: 鈥淲hen people would come by, Ralph [Koppel鈥檚 father] would dump out pieces of a puzzle and say, 鈥極K Jimmy, go to it.鈥� Here, he wasn鈥檛 able to talk, and he was just walking some, but not a whole lot. So he would scramble around on the floor putting together some pretty complex and intricate puzzles. It literally was a floorshow. As he put the pieces together, everyone would be amazed and ask, 鈥楬ow did he do that?鈥欌��
The question went unanswered even as he mastered, by the age of 3, puzzles that had more than 100 pieces. His cerebral prowess extended beyond puzzles. Most 4-year-olds could be amused during car rides by listening to songs from the purple dinosaur Barney. His dad says that when he buckled his son into the car seat for trips around town, the two of them played a game instead. Ralph, a computer programmer with a graduate degree in management information systems and a co-founder of a software company, would give his son algebra problems to solve: 鈥淚 remember asking him things like, 鈥楾wo x plus seven equals 3, what鈥檚 x?鈥� And he鈥檇 solve for x.鈥�
Growing up, while other kids his age were thinking about Little League games and spelling contests, Jimmy was pondering the mysteries of the universe, in part through devouring science fiction and philosophy books. He also thought about structuring his own business. By middle school, he was in business, says his mom: 鈥淢any of his classmates were playing video games; Jimmy, though, was also writing them. And my recollection is that they must have been pretty good because he sold them at a fundraiser for his school.鈥�
Exploring new perspectives and seeking new experiences continued to be important to Koppel as he grew into a young man. Take, for example, the time when he was 12 years old on a family trip to Italy. Did he order spaghetti and meatballs? Nope. 鈥淲e were in Venice,鈥� says his mom, 鈥渁nd he ordered boiled octopus. The waitress said, 鈥榊oung man, you don鈥檛 want that,鈥� and he said, 鈥榊es, I do.鈥� She took him to the window and showed him what the boiled octopus looked like. It didn鈥檛 look appetizing to me, this greyish plate, so I said to him, 鈥楯immy, if you get this, you鈥檙e going to eat it, and you鈥檙e not going to get any of my dinner.鈥� Then, the owner of the restaurant came out and said, 鈥楲isten to your mom, you don鈥檛 want that,鈥� but he kept saying, 鈥榊es, I do.鈥� So, I let him order it. He ate most of it, too, and didn鈥檛 complain or ask for any of our food.鈥�
Koppel wasn鈥檛 a typical youngster, and he wasn鈥檛 your typical college student. Three years ago, he enrolled in Carnegie Mellon鈥檚 , which has been consistently ranked among the top computer science programs over the decades. He embraced the challenging curriculum, majoring in both computer science and . Near the end of his freshman year, he found his passion for , when one day he 鈥渨oke up and realized something was wrong鈥� with the architecture of software development. It needed to be simplified, and he felt he was up to the task.
As he contemplated how to start fixing what was wrong with software development, he learned about the 鈥�20 Under 20鈥� , which was established by PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Its slogan, 鈥淭wo Years. $100,000. Some Ideas Just Can鈥檛 Wait,鈥� appealed to Koppel. Thiel fellows are given a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 to focus on their work, their research, and their self-education鈥攁ll in lieu of college. They are mentored by a network of 鈥渧isionary thinkers, investors, scientists, and entrepreneurs鈥� who provide guidance and business connections. The hope is that the fellowship will bring 鈥渁mbitious ideas and projects to life鈥� for people younger than 20.
Koppel certainly had an ambitious project鈥攁utomating the work in computer programming, which frequently requires making small adjustments in thousands of places. If he could do that, he believes that a future Y2K, with its $300 billion price tag to correct, would be eliminated.
Along with applicants from more than 40 countries, he decided to apply for one of the 20 available 2012 Thiel Fellowships, undeterred by the fine print, which would mean stopping his enrollment in school during the fellowship and moving to California.
For Koppel, that wouldn鈥檛 be a problem because of all the credits he had already amassed in his first three years at Carnegie Mellon. 鈥淗e was really active in taking more classes than most people,鈥� marvels Joe Appel (CS鈥�13), Koppel鈥檚 roommate in Morewood Towers. The additional credits, combined with courses over the summer, meant that Koppel could complete his dual degree in computer science and mathematical sciences a year early. And when he learned he was selected for the fellowship, that鈥檚 exactly what he decided to do.
After completing his Carnegie Mellon requirements last summer, he moved to San Francisco, and he took with him some valuable insights gleaned during his condensed undergraduate career. In addition to the rigorous academic studies, he credits Carnegie Mellon with simply building his capacity for working hard and working efficiently.
The Thiel Foundation is glad to have him on board and expects great things from him and the other fellows, who are involved in pursuits that include diagnosing disease through biomedical images to eliminating checkout lines and shoplifting in the retail world.
鈥淲e continue to be blown away by the quality of ideas coming from 20 Under 20 applicants,鈥� says Jonathan Cain, president of the Thiel Foundation. The co-founder of the fellowship, Jim O鈥橬eill, adds that 鈥渟ince becoming Thiel fellows over the last year, members of our inaugural class have already done some amazing things. They鈥檝e started and sold companies, closed million-dollar funding rounds, won international entrepreneurship and scientific awards, spearheaded innovative social movements, and begun to transform fields like education, software development, clean energy, electric vehicles, robotics, medical technology, and finance.鈥� And it bears repeating that all of them were under the age of 20.
As for Koppel, who is part of the second class, Cain says, 鈥淛immy has a vision where programmers are more like builders than handymen, and he is working on systems or tools to enable manipulation of programs without having to have access to the source code鈥t鈥檚 inspiring.鈥�
In his Silicon Valley apartment, Koppel can dine on Pad Thai every night for dinner if he chooses. Because the Thiel Fellowship has no micro-manager requesting daily reports, it鈥檚 not outside the realm of possibility for a young man with no money worries to lie around all day in his pajamas, play video games, watch TV, and lose an overall sense of urgency.
But Koppel has never been typical, something affirmed by , who was Koppel鈥檚 research mentor and supervisor when he was an undergraduate researcher in the at Carnegie Mellon. Aldrich, an associate professor and director of the university鈥檚 software engineering minor, observed Koppel constantly as a self-starter who regularly re-evaluated the status of his research to figure out the best direction to proceed. No roadmap was necessary for the student. To have that kind of awareness, says Aldrich, involves astute intuition, as well as intelligence, in order to make progress in uncharted territories. Aldrich believes those characteristics will serve Koppel well during his Thiel Fellowship.
Since moving to San Francisco, Koppel says he has begun to make progress in developing automated software re-engineering tools. He likens his work with an analogy:
鈥淪uppose you wanted to bring the world to a common electrical standard so that you could plug in any device, anywhere. You would need to modify most of the world鈥檚 electrical infrastructure, replace every outlet and plug, and tweak the designs of a lot of devices. This would of course be prohibitively expensive. We encounter similar problems in software. However, in the digital world, where you can just say what change should be made and make it happen, this should be easy鈥攂ut, for most aspects, it鈥檚 equally difficult. My vision is to fix that.鈥�
The example everyone knows well is the Y2K scare at the turn of the century. There was concern that the 鈥�00鈥� designation for the year 2000 would cause date-related processing to operate incorrectly because the 鈥�... 97, 98, 99鈥� ascending numbering assumption would suddenly become invalid with 鈥�00.鈥� In addition, some programmers had misunderstood the rule that although years that are exactly divisible by 100 are not leap years, if they are divisible by 400 then they are. Thus, the year 2000 was a leap year. Because these bugs weren鈥檛 automatically recognized during coding, everything from banking security mechanisms to global energy infrastructure to major logistics systems were vulnerable. To ensure that these software systems operated after New Year鈥檚 Eve 1999, it took fixes.
During those fixes, when software code is being worked on, programs can be unstable, making them vulnerable to additional breakdowns and hacking. Legacy code is software code that was developed in previous eras鈥攗sing antiquated software programming languages鈥攁nd is often the most problematic to work with today. Legacy code structures are often long and pieced together over time, which can amplify the problems that bugs create. It takes large amounts of time for programmers to read through the code, create fixes, and insert the fixes into the code to make it more stable and secure.
鈥淢aking code Y2K compliant was some of the most tedious, soul-draining work around,鈥� says Koppel. 鈥淲hen [writer and director] Mike Judge wanted to portray a dreary corporate existence in his film Office Space, he chose a protagonist with a job fixing Y2K. Y2K was very much a boring problem, but I am interested in boring problems鈥攂oring problems are easy; easy problems can be automated.鈥�
Now on his own, Koppel is teaching himself a new programming language that will potentially, through automated tools, revamp the way that software is developed and maintained, which would eliminate the need for fixes in code. 鈥淏y making programming simpler, smart people can enter fields like biology and find cures for diseases like cancer,鈥� he says. With that, he has a bite of the leftover Pad Thai and gets back to work.
Emmett Zitelli (HNZ鈥�01) of Pittsburgh is a writer for various publications and is a regular contributor to this magazine.
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