STEVE EXUM ’ 92
COURTESY OF THE THORP FAMILY
‘He is incredibly quick in every
aspect of everything he does.
It’s kinda scary. Religion, literature,
the stock market — I don’t care
what it is, it’s encyclopedic knowledge,
and surprisingly in-depth. The term
for that is Renaissance man —
but it’s renaissance that goes
in some odd directions.’
Steve Allred ’ 74
former executive associate provost
because from the very beginning he was
very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He really
thought intellectually, this was good stuff.”
Thorp thought he might be headed for
medicine, and Meyer is among those who
“felt real good about rescuing him from
medical school.”
He was mesmerized with the process of
discovery, and he couldn’t be kept out of
the lab. “It just plugged in perfectly with
music, doing lights in the theater and all
these things I had done before, where you
have this set of knowledge and tools, and
you mess around with it in a creative way
and try to conclude something new,”
Thorp told the Review six years ago. “You
try to come up with a way to do it that
nobody had thought of before.”
After he’d been away to Cal Tech for his
doctorate and to Yale for his postdoc, he
landed a position at N.C. State University, a
choice influenced in part by Patti Worden,
four years his senior, who had been on
stage with him in Fayetteville and in his
thoughts ever since. During the two years
at State, MIT and Berkeley were among
the schools that were after him.
Carolina got him back. His students got
a demonstration of an exothermic reaction
via a home movie in which Thorp Thorp,
Rebel Alliance pilot, shoots down the
Death Star with a PVC pipe potato gun.
Thorp welcomed undergraduates into his
lab. He piled up teaching awards, including
the prestigious Hettleman Prize for Artistic
and Scholarly Achievement by Young Faculty, and the Tanner Teaching Award.
Joe Templeton,Venable Professor of
chemistry and now chair of the UNC faculty, noticed that Thorp knew when to set
the work aside. He’d kept his hand in
music throughout his schooling. As an
assistant professor on the demanding tenure
track, he’d take off on a road trip with a
Greek folk band he played with. “Playing
hard, distinct from working hard, is a quality of a successful person,” Templeton said.
“He knew when to quit and play.”
Thorp still plays keyboard with a jazz
band called Equinox; when the members
need an unfamiliar piece of music charted
out, Thorp makes quick work of it. It’s
apparent that he could no more cut himself off from music than he could from
chemistry.
“He is incredibly quick in every aspect
of everything he does,” said Steve Allred
’ 74, who played bass in the band before
leaving this year to be provost at the University of Richmond. “It’s kinda scary. Religion, literature, the stock market — I don’t
care what it is, it’s encyclopedic knowledge,
and surprisingly in-depth. The term for that
is Renaissance man — but it’s renaissance
that goes in some odd directions.”
That summer in Boston he heard a 19-
year-old Wynton Marsalis. Years later, Marsalis
