The famous German philosopher Edmund Husserl, his dissertation director, thought he was brilliant, not just as a philosopher but as a multitalented renaissance man. As the professor put it in a letter to his star student, “You can work not only with shovels and hoes, cutting trees and building houses, but also with a fine intellectual scalpel—you have fine fingers, and an incorruptible love of truth, free from prejudice to the last.”