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I was born 1936 in Waltham, Massachusetts, the son of E. Bright Wilson Jr. and Emily Buckingham Wilson. My father was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University; my mother had one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage. My grandfather on my mother's side was a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; my other grandfather was a lawyer, and one time Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

My schooling took place in Wellesley, Woods Hole, Massachusetts (second, third/fourth grades in two years), Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Mass. (from fifth to eighth grade), ninth grade at the Magdalen College School in Oxford, England, and tenth and twelfth grades (skipping the eleventh) at the George School in eastern Pennsylvania. Before the year in England I had read about mathematics and physics in books supplied by my father and his friends. I learned the basic principle of calculus from Mathematics and Imagination by Kasner and Newman, and went of to work through a calculus text, until I got stuck in a chapter on involutes and evolutes. Around this time I decided to become a physicist. Later (before entering college) I remember working on symbolic logic with my father; he also tried, unsuccessfully, to teach me group theory. I found high school dull. In 1952 I entered Harvard. I majored in mathematics, but studied physics (both by intent), participated in the Putnam Mathematics competition, and ran the mile for the track team (and crosscountry as well). I began research, working summers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, especially for Arnold Arons (then based at Amherst).