"I liked the fact it was so hard," he says. "I would sit in a course given by John Rawls...I knew something great was going on and I just didn't get it."

He got it in time to write a summacum laude thesis, and he decided the questions raised by philosophy classes would become his life's work.

"I'm gripped by them," he says of the questions of logical theory he works to solve. He is "trying to think in most abstract ways about human cognition and human reason."

Asked to explain his research to a layperson, the professor leans forward and describes his works to explain the basis of mathematical thought, the axioms from which people's understanding of mathematical theorems stem.

"I worry about questions like what is the nature of inference, and what kind of sense can we make of the foundation of mathematics," he says. At its most basic, he is explaining the foundation for logical thought.

But as he admits, it is not a field of which the great mass of humanity is aware or understands. "These are hard problems but absolutely pervasive ones," he says. "It's an inquiry as to whether there's anything under the surface."

One can either "go on with ordinary uncritical practices of gathering knowledge," or one can seek to explore how that knowledge fits into a logical framework and what precisely constitutes "knowledge," he says. It is this exploration to which Goldfarb is dedicated, whether or not society ever understands the answers he provides.

It has brought him a meteoric rise in the academic world; from the College, he went to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he won a coveted place among the Junior Fellows. He joined the Faculty after graduation and lose quickly through the ranks, gaining tenure in 1982.

But the intellectual quest and the successful academic career it brought was only half of the story of Goldfarb's time at Harvard. When he was a happy undergraduate, despite the agitation for equal rights and accep tance at Harvard in the late 1960s, he was in a place where gays were "perverts" and coming out was impossible.

In graduate school, while he continuing his interest in music with voice lessons, he also underwent psychotherapy, seeking a "cure" for his sexual orientation.

"The culture viewed you as being in a diseased state, as unnatural," he says.

Around the time he got his doctorate sexual orientation. It was the difficulty of that process that led him, as a junior professor, to hold out a hand to younger people experiencing the same struggles.

"I had a hard time coming to tennis with my own orientation," he says. "I felt any help we could give to younger people was necessary."

But Goldfarb did not "come out" or begin any public pro-gay activity until after his tenure in 1982.

"I wasn't actively trying to hide it," he says, but "I had some concerns it might impact the tenure process."

Besides as a tenure vote approaches, a junior faculty member has no time for activism. "You don't even have hobbies at that point," Goldfarb says. Also, he recalls, he was convinced he "could do a lot more as a senior professor" than as an non-tenured member of the Faculty.