Professor Lyon

For all those history nerds out there or people who wonder why you get this day off from work/school: today is Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday. Now there’s a lesser known and slightly older birthday today, too. Stephen Lyon, the father of the famed Lyon family. Yep, once again, because I can’t call, and e-mail is completely outdated, I am including my birthday wishes on a blog. Also, I know how many e-mail he gets and the possibility of it being wrongly sorted while he works long into the night is quite high.

My first memory of my father was the summer we lived in California when I turn 3. Mary and I were fighting about something with her blue stuffed animal (I think I threatened to break it) and he yelled at us. I remember a distinct sense of satisfaction, so I think he yelled at Mary more for hurting me on my birthday (Ha Ha). So the real question is, why was an east coast kid doing in California for a summer? That sounds wrong and completely unbefitting for someone on my stature.

Dad’s work is the answer. His work has taken us all over the world (or at least him and some fraction of the time). I’ve lived in Austria twice and England once. Catherine traveled to Turkey and Greece, Dean to Alaska, Mary to Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and I got my trip to Peru; all because of my father’s travels. Now that none of us are stuck at home, my Dad has taken her all over, too. She’s been taken to Kenya (the events of my time left at home while they were in Kenya make for a very exciting story), and last summer they were in Russia. Basically we have traveled all over the Western World because of his work, and have seen things many people only read about on CNN.

Now all this travel is not free, it comes with a price. He works… a lot. During my brief (8 month) stint of unemployment in 2009 there were times when I’d go to sleep at 2am and wake up at 11am and he’d still be in his study, often times asleep. He takes his work very seriously, and work ethic is extremely important to him. I don’t think the relaxed a laid back work culture of Georgia would mesh with my Dad’s 7am-8pm work schedule. So why does anyone in their right mind work that much? Because he loves what he does for a living. I haven’t met anyone who loved their job as much as my father, he really got his dream job, and although busy and hard, he loves it. Sounds like his students love it, too. Here are some things I found at RateMyProfessors.com:


“Lyon knows his stuff backwards, forwards, sideways, and in the black of night in the middle of darkest Peru. He's an excellent advisor if you're looking.” Easiness 2, Helpfulness 5, Clarity 5, Rater Interest 5.

“Great teacher, but he is also one of the hardest teachers I ever had. He demands a lot out of his students, but he is still a great teacher and always willing to help. He can often be a little too demanding and might get upset if you do something really stupid. Lesson: Don't do anything stupid.” Easiness 1, Helpfulness 5, Clarity 5, Rater Interest 3.


This work ethic also applies to us children. If we’re not working hard enough, or not achieving, or trying to achieve something we are sure to hear about it. Even thousands of miles away my Dad can tell me I need to spend more time studying Georgian. The year I graduated high school and my brother graduated college we were both put to work in my Dad’s office. We did all sorts of stuff, but it was primarily because neither of us had jobs at the time. We weren’t paid, except for what my Dad would say, “You get lunch, and should feel lucky to get that”. Now that I remember I spent my summer before Junior year of high school in that office, too. I built a computer, wrote computer programs, and scanned… thousands, and thousands of books and papers into his computer. I was the “scanbot”. Now why couldn’t he get some graduate student slave to do this work? Well, they get paid. Don’t pay someone to do it when you have kids, right? Now the best part about these summers was the occasionally we could make our way to the undergrad lab and kill each other in Doom for some insane number of hours until my Mom called at 10pm.

So another thing, my Dad is really smart. I mean, there’s “smart” and then there’s SMART (and I don’t mean self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology). Not only did he go to Cornell University for undergrad, he got into Cal Tech for graduate school. From there he had options at numerous powerful companies, including Bell Labs, but he chose to teach at Princeton (did he foresee the collapse of Bell Labs?). After a former girlfriend met my dad she commented, “I wonder how he sees the world. We all must look so strangely stupid to him”.

My Dad’s magic with computers is legendary. Often a stubborn computer will just give up when put face to face with him. Sometimes he doesn’t need to be face to face, the computer just knows I called him, and it suddenly says “Oh crap, I’m in for it now”. I’ve learned a lot about computers from him, and although I can’t program a fun game of Minesweeper or Pong anymore, I can fix almost any computer problem I have, because he taught me how (plus he sometimes got upset with how much we bothered him with the problems that I decided I better try to make it work on my own first).

As we all get older, and you start hearing more about Quantum Computing, remember that my dad is at the forefront of this. I don’t know what it means, but somehow you’re supposed to spin electrons on liquid helium and then magic happens to make a computer. I’m a natural at this semi-conductor solid state physics stuff, eh?

So enough about work. What my Dad truly loves is the outdoors. My whole family, but especially Dean and I have had the best adventures in the outdoors with him. You’d have to ask my brother about his week in the Alaskan backcountry in 1994, but we both have extremely fond memories of three weeks in 1999 as we fulfilled my father’s dream of backpacking the 221 mile John Muir Trail. That trail is a big part of my childhood, and also solidified my love for backpacking and the outdoors. Since then we haven’t taken nearly as many trips as either of us would have liked. We’ve talked a lot about hiking in South America when Dean and I return, or trying to take Eden, my nephew. I was really happy that I spent one of my final weekends in the states taking a small overnight trip with him in the Pine Barrens. Ironic enough, that trip was also my first backpacking trip when I was 9.

When I was young, he used to come into my classrooms and do cool science things with us (and I of course would be the helper). The class would sit in awe as he played with dry ice and liquid nitrogen, things I’ve grown up playing with. You had Nintendo, I had circuit boards. If you haven’t tried liquid nitrogen ice cream, you haven’t lived. My father also enjoys computer games. He doesn’t have the time to play them often, and I get the feeling every time I buy one for him it usually just means I’ll play it. Nonetheless, we have conquered all three Halo’s, Doom, Doom 2, and Quake as a team. It’s always fun when you have to save him because he doesn’t understand the controller and is spinning around in circles throwing grenades at the wall, yet somehow still alive and killing aliens.

I truly picked one of the best role models.

Well, this is it for my father’s birthday blog post. I hope his day will be full of good Tex Max from Moe’s (very predictable). Love, Thomas.