George Szpiro – ETH CIRCLE

George Szpiro
Former Correspondent
NZZ

I studied Mathematics at ETH Zurich in the 1960s; when I was doing my Matura, it was obvious that if you wanted to do maths, you had to go to ETH. I then got an MBA at Stanford, followed by a PhD in Economics at Hebrew University, and taught a bit, before changing careers: I decided to become a journalist, and was a correspondent for NZZ for many years.

My link with ETH during that time was that I had a mathematics column, which was later turned into several books. So I became an author as well. Unfortunately, there were 40 years during which I didn’t hear from ETH, until I met the ETH Global Team and a group of alumni at ETH Meets New York, and then was approached to become a member of the ETH Circle. American universities constantly send out things to their alumni, but I never really heard from ETH, and I am happy to be connected again.

To explain to people what ETH is, the boring cliché is to tell them that Einstein went there. There are also rankings I often refer to, because ETH does very well in many topics, which is an important point. And when I am in New York, I can point out that some of the bridges were built by ETH graduates. It would be important to work on some of the communications aspects of ETH, and how we tell the story of ETH.

My pet project is that we need a publishing house; all the great universities have one, it’s something that’s missing at ETH. This would benefit the ETH brand tremendously. I also would be interested in doing something with the ETH alumni in Tel Aviv; it would be great to activate some of the international activities of the Alumni Association.