↑ Gates was a sophomore in Lewis' combinatorics class when Lewis posed the pancake sorting problem as "an example of a problem that was easy to describe but [nonetheless] had not been solved". Gates brought a solution to Lewis a few days afterward, and later published it with the assistance of Christos Papadimitriou, an assistant professor at Harvard at the time.[2]
↑ Leinweber became a financial analyst after joining the Harvard applied mathematics graduate program intending to study computer graphics, but discovering that the graphics courses were no longer taught. Lewis became his "de facto advisor", steered him to broader studies, and (through his connections with the RAND Corporation) helped get him his first job.[3]
↑ Seltzer worked for Lewis as an undergraduate teaching assistant in a course that, years later, she herself taught after joining the Harvard faculty.[4]
↑ Vadhan writes that taking Lewis' course as an undergraduate "opened my eyes to the deep and beautiful theory on which computer science is built ... What I found extraordinary ... was that students could learn about open problems at the frontier of the field – basic problems that we aren't even close to solving – in an introductory course." Later, a 2004 sabbatical by Lewis gave Vadhan the chance to teach the same course himself.[5]
↑ In 2004 Zuckerberg wrote to Lewis,Professor, I've been interested in graph theory and its applications to social networks for a while now, so I did some research ... that has to do with linking people through articles they appear in from [The Crimson, the Harvard student newspaper]. I thought people would find this interesting, so I've set up a preliminary site that allows people to find the connection (through people and articles) from any person to the most frequently mentioned person in the time frame I looked at. That person is you.I wanted to ask your permission to put this site up though, since it has your name in its title.After some discussion Lewis gave his approval: "Sure, what the hell. Seems harmless."[6]
