Paul Bamberg received an undergraduate degree in physics from Harvard in 1963 and a doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford in 1967. For 28 years he taught the premedical physics course in Harvard College, the Extension School, and the Summer School, while building up the computer science program at the Extension school and teaching assembly language programming and data structures.
Bamberg retired from teaching in 1995 to devote himself fulltime to speech recognition research at Dragon Systems. In 2000 he unretired and returned to Harvard in the mathematics department. Since then he has done his best to make upper-level mathematics courses available to Extension students. He received the Petra T. Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Award in 2005, the Dean's Distinguished Service Award in 1995, and he was honored for 25 years of Extension teaching in 1994. Prospects for a second retirement are dim, since his new appointment runs though 2020.