Interview with John Mitchell

So I go to interview Prof. Mitchell, and the first thing he does is answer
the question that I always wanted to know. Why are professors so
absentminded? Because they have too many things to keep on their minds and
their schedules are very busy. Prof. Mitchell was certainly a busy guy
giving me just a couple minutes just before having to go teach a class. He
says 40% of his time is spent on research, 40% is on teaching, and 20% is
on administrative stuff to keep the department running such as sitting on
admission committees and things like that.

Of everything he does, research is the most fun, allowing him to look for
ideas. In fact, before coming to Stanford he worked at Bell Labs for 4
years. But he got bored. He called it the ideal research job. There was
nothing he had to do and he got complete freedom to choose what one wanted
to do. But there wasn't enough interaction with people and so when he heard
there was an opening at Stanford, he came here. He especially enjoys the
clever and creative students that Stanford has.

His main interests lie in programming language research and the mathematics
and theory of type analysis. He was a math major as an undergrad, but for
his first job he was already writing computer programs. He went to graduate
school at MIT in 1980. He likes computer science since it involves new
questions while math is just problem solving. The future direction that he
sees computer science is work on the interaction between computers and the
real world and how to model the real world inside a computer. For example,
trying to describe a toilet to a computer is still a difficult thing to do.

His days are filled with regular meetings with graduate students, research
staff, and faculty meetings. This quarter he teaches two classes and he
teaches a total of three classes a year.

He summarizes his job as a job where you have to think. For example, when
one teaches and one is standing in front of a large group of people, it is
probably a good idea to make sense. This requires you to think. I like it.
A teacher who thinks.