for me to stay, work, and study with him at Los Alamos. And to all the peo- ple who’ve given me a chance to visit and be enlightened outside Columbia in my graduate career: John Harris and Helen Caines at Yale; everyone at BNL, but especially Dima Kharzeev, Larry McLerran, Rob Pisarski, and Raju Venugopalan; Ralf Rapp at Texas A&M; Volcker Koch, Nu Xu, and Xin-Nian Wang at LBNL; Urs Wiedemann and Karel Safarik in $_{Cern}$; Peter Levai in Budapest; Charles Gale, Sangyong Jeon, and Guy Moore at McGill; and of course Ulrich Heinz and Yuri Kovchegov at OSU for giving me a job! Then there’s pretty much everyone else in a field filled with generally kind and per- spicacious people. Of especial note are Magdalena and Denes, Joerg Aichelin, Nestor Armesto, Steffan Bass, Jorge Casalderrey-Solana, Hendrik van Hees, Abhijit Majumder, Berndt Mueller, Jamie Nagle, Andre Peshier, Carlos Sal- gado, and Derek Teaney. 

Azfar Adil, Simon Wicks, Kurt Hinterbichler, Tatia Englemore, Ali Hanks, and Eric Vazquez, my Columbia colleagues, I am so grateful for your support and illuminating conversations. I’ve valued your friendship over these years, and I’ll miss all of you. 

And for always being there, my friends Ian, Phil, and Young from back home. 

Finally, to Mr. Owens for inspiring me to a career in physics with girls swinging pianos in circles around their heads, Porsches racing off starting lines, and cones tipping over ever-steepening ledges: thank you. 

