An Audacious Mind Escaping an isolated, brutal childhood and driven by unquenchable curiosity, Michael Waterman applied a world-class intellect to create math that helps biologists understand the essence of life.

Before he could earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in math at Oregon State and head off to become one of the most brilliant thinkers of his time, Michael Waterman had to get outside.

In the remote coastal valley where he grew up, “outside” meant anywhere else. It was a place eyed with suspicion, as was anyone who wanted to go there.

His ancestors had settled along Four Mile Creek in the southwestern corner of the state in 1911, having traversed hundreds of unforgiving miles from Eastern Oregon in 45 days in a covered wagon. Motorized transport was available but expensive, so they journeyed the hard way.

The hard way was how Waterman’s father did pretty much everything on the family sheep and cattle ranch, and as soon as his oldest son could work, the boy became his main laborer and a frequent target of physical threats and profane tirades.

“I cannot recall a time as a child when I did not deeply hate him,” Waterman wrote in his 2016 autobiography, Getting Outside: A Far-Western Childhood. “I was like a shovel or an axe, a tool to get the job done.” His father often called him stupid, and routinely harangued him with detailed instructions on how to do simple tasks, then sent him up the valley to work all day on his own.

Neither the father nor the son could know that young Michael was destined for greatness. He would grow up to found the fields of bioinformatics and quantitative biology; be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering; and receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. Working at the outer edge of human knowledge, he and his colleagues would invent formulas to help microbiologists analyze complex structures and begin to predict what might happen as they changed. To the wizards of the Human Genome Project, Waterman would be what he smilingly calls “their math guy.” In 2020, he would receive the $100,000 William Benter Prize for “outstanding mathematical contributions that have had a direct and fundamental impact on scientific, business, finance and engineering applications.”

I was like a shovel or an axe, a tool to get the job done.

---

But on those grueling mornings back on the farm, his father delivered Michael’s marching orders as if addressing an idiot, and the boy feigned rapt attention lest he be punished on the spot.

“One of the turning points was when I stopped paying any attention to him after I’d listened long enough to know what I had to accomplish,” Waterman recalled. “I could figure it out on my own, do it smarter and faster and have time to explore.”

He was sustained by those glorious hours when, chores done, he’d hike up to where the creek formed crystalline pools, sometimes getting down on his belly to watch tiny fish dart to and fro.

At 79, Waterman still loves to watch fish flit about in a mountain stream, and sometimes he catches a few on well-presented flies. Semiretired in Pasadena, California, he is a university professor emeritus at the University of Southern California and distinguished research professor at the University of Virginia.

He followed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oregon State in 1964 and 1966 with a doctorate in statistics and probability from Michigan State University in 1969, then worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and at Idaho State University. His fame grew as he met and exchanged theories and formulas with legendary mathematicians. Always seeking to test his mind, he kept an eye on the elite microbiologists who worked with DNA and RNA structures in living cells.

“For me, it wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to go help the biologists,” he recalled with a mischievous smile. “It was more like, ‘Ooh, they have some really cool problems over there,’ and it pleased me to work on them.”

Work on them he did, and soon he was the acknowledged leader of a new field, quantitative biology, and also its chief promoter.

I wonder, if there wasn’t somewhere like Oregon State for me to go to when I was ready to get outside, what would have happened to me.

---

“I guess you could say I engaged in a little branding, because what we were doing needed an identity. I looked for opportunities for the area to grow and to bring people in who would make great contributions.” He co-edited the field’s main journal for decades and helped convene annual meetings to share ideas.

“There are thousands of people in it now,” he said.

Thinking back, Waterman marvels at the unlikely progression of his life. In his memoir, he describes what happened after he showed up for first grade at the tiny local schoolhouse:

“In a few weeks, my teacher sent a message home that I was far behind the class. An ex-teacher, my mother was upset and set out to make things right. Amazing to me now, she had not read to me as a child so I had no introduction to reading, nor to arithmetic. She made cards for the letters and sounds, and for arithmetic, and drilled me each night. Apparently I did not learn my sums properly, and in frustration she made me eat one of those flash cards. … Full of flash card, I did learn my letters and sums.”

Published in 2016, Waterman’s autobiography tells the story of how he transcended an isolated and often brutal childhood in a remote coastal Oregon valley where the rest of the world was known, simply, as “outside.”

In third grade he read a biography of frontiersman Daniel Boone that triggered a lifelong devotion to reading as fuel for his imagination. “I quickly read all the books that my schools had in their libraries that were of any interest to me. … My family possessed only a few books, and I suffered from not enough to read. I worried that there might be too few books in the world.”

In high school, a few teachers and counselors told Waterman he had the talent for college. Both his desire to leave the tiny valley and his trepidation about doing so led him to consider Oregon State College, which was, maybe, not impossibly far away. He received little or no encouragement from his family for his desire to better himself, but he would flourish in Corvallis.

His college classwork made it increasingly obvious that he had a gift for sophisticated math, while his summer job in the coastal mountains reminded him of what he was escaping.

“In the logging woods where I worked setting chokers, the cables and winches created dangers which were beyond my experience and intuition,” he wrote. “Limbs and logs flew in every direction and I was often paralyzed by indecision as to which way to run.” Two men were killed on the logging site one year, one decapitated when a steel cable snapped, the other crushed “when a log fell off a truck onto him, the log rolling up the hill a bit before it came back down onto his already-dead body.”

The beat-up old loggers he worked with — men his family looked down upon for their itinerant, rough-hewn lives — tried to keep him alive and admired how hard he worked. As he writes in his book, they urged him to “get that ed-a-cation and don’t spend your life doin’ this. Find yourself a better way to make a living.”

Today Waterman sponsors a scholarship fund to help first-generation students at OSU, and he is on the OSU College of Science Board of Advisors. He said he will always be grateful that the university was there for him when he needed it.

“I wonder, if there wasn’t somewhere like Oregon State for me to go to when I was ready to get outside, what would have happened to me.”