And finally, change requires more than just speaking out -- it requires listening, as well. In particular, it requires listening to those with whom you disagree, and being prepared to compromise. When I was a state senator, I helped pass Illinois's first racial profiling law, and one of the first laws in the nation requiring the videotaping of confessions in capital cases. And we were successful because, early on, I engaged law enforcement.

But I couldn’t let myself feel that way until it was all right to. And that’s part of the surgical mind too, addressing what you need to, and you know you can do, and postponing how you feel about it, thinking only of the patient and what you need to do.

Being a scientist is about resilience because science is exploring the unknown, just as an immigrant is exploring the unknown. In both, you are on an uncertain journey and you have to find your own North Star.

Well, yes, no, I certainly visualise … it was really … I had to have a very good idea of the geometry – that was crucial. Spacetime geometry so it's not three dimensions, you have to think of the whole four dimensional spacetime, and I get sort of used to thinking about four dimensions and using various tricks to get the picture properly. I do most of my thinking in visual terms, and I'm a very visual thinker rather than writing down equations.

Having advanced well beyond what the French call "a certain age," I am often asked to convey to younger people helpful advice and counsel. So I will open these remarks with the best advice I ever received. The advice, which I have several times shared with others, was given to me by my mother-in-law on my wedding day. She had a prescription for a happy, enduring marriage: "It pays," she said, "it pays sometimes to be a little deaf."

I was fortunate to be born at the right time and to be in the right place when the Women’s Movement came alive. So many things were wrong with the way life was ordered in the ’70s. In many states, women didn’t serve on juries, to take just one example, and there were so many jobs that were off limits to women. People began to realize there was something wrong about that, and women should be free to aspire and achieve just as men are. So I had legal education, and I could use that education to help move this movement for change, for allowing women to realize their full potential, help move that along. So it was that ten years of my life that I devoted to litigating cases about — I don’t say women’s rights — I say the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women. I was tremendously fortunate to be able to participate in that movement for change.

My mother-in-law’s advice, which she gave me on the day of our wedding — we were married in Marty’s home, and his mother took me into the bedroom, her bedroom and said, “Dear, I’d like to tell you the secret of a happy marriage.” “Yes. What is the secret?” “It helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” And I found that advice — it stood me in very good stead not only in a wonderful marriage that lasted well over half a century, but in every workplace I’ve served, dealing with my faculty colleagues when I was a law teacher, and even now with my colleagues on the Supreme Court. When an unkind word is said, a thoughtless word, best to tune out.