Philip Stone, 69, a scientist with a passion for discovery

Those born of a precocious intelligence often skip a grade or two. Philip Stone skipped high school.

By 23, he had a doctorate in social psychology from Harvard University's Department of Social Relations. Within a few years he was a tenured professor at the university and had created a groundbreaking approach to applying computers to the social sciences.

In a life that embraced contrasts, Dr. Stone was a world-renowned specialist in his field who still found time to read widely on far-flung topics. He was deeply committed to dozens of close friends all over the world, and engaged with students so intensely that a single encounter could make them feel they had met their mentor. Yet in his personal life, he pulled back from making long-term commitments.

''People would say, 'What's this guy like?' " said Dannielle Kennedy of Cambridge, who had been Dr. Stone's girlfriend. ''And I'd say, 'He was a Quaker. He was a conscientious objector. He rides his bicycle around Cambridge. He drives a Prius. And he's not interested in wealth.' "

Dr. Stone, whose General Inquirer program helped make it possible for computers to analyze the content of text, died Jan. 31 at his Cambridge home. His family and friends declined to disclose the cause of death. He was 69 and had lived alone at the center of many overlapping circles of friends.

''He was the bellwether of human potential," the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, a friend, said Friday while conducting Dr. Stone's memorial service at Harvard. ''We are impoverished by his death."

Born in Chicago, Philip J. Stone grew up in Evanston, Ill., and nearby Morton Grove. He attended the University of Chicago, where he completed the Great Books program.

To his family he was Pebbles, or just Pebs, for a little stone. The nickname was still incongruously applied after he grew taller than 6 feet and had developed his bark of a laugh. Some summers he worked on his grandfather's dairy farm in Holmen, Wis., just north of La Crosse and not far from the Mississippi River.

''It was real primitive," said his brother, Steve of San Francisco. ''They had an outhouse and everything. And he loved it."

In the years after receiving his doctorate, Dr. Stone became an early adherent of computers at a time when each machine took up much of a room.

''As a social scientist, he came of age at a time of great optimism," Roger Hurwitz, a close friend and neighbor, said at a gathering at Dr. Stone's condo last month, several days after he died.

Dr. Stone's General Inquirer program helped make his international reputation. He was sought after as a visiting teacher and launched into world travel, a pastime that would come to define him. Among friends, the consensus was that if anyone mentioned a place, Dr. Stone had already visited and could provide suggestions for a suitable place to dine.

''A lot of us knew that Phil had many friends, even if the friends never met," said Hurwitz, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ''He was a hub with many, many spokes."

He had added international spokes through his work over the past decade as a senior scientist with the Gallup Organization. Dr. Stone, who believed strongly in having fun, also would arrange to take friends and family on vacations.

''He had friends everywhere," said his brother, the only surviving member of Dr. Stone's immediate family. ''When he'd come to visit me in San Francisco, he'd have more friends there than I do."

And he often would rearrange his schedule on a business trip to meet someone for dinner, even if that meant traveling a few hundred miles -- or a few countries -- out of his way.

''He had the most amazing grasp of geography and place," Kennedy said in an e-mail. ''His father had been a traveling salesman, and I always thought this was one small way he connected with his Dad, who would describe the places to which he traveled to Philip as a small boy. . . . Once I was out to dinner with friends in New York and I called him to check in briefly, and when I told him where I was, he described the architecture of the room I was sitting in. The name of the restaurant had changed, the place was by no means famous, but he just had that in his mental archive."

Dr. Stone also spent years studying workplace psychology, from how to encourage people to work more compatibly to designing work spaces. Along with scholarly research, he drew from such disparate sources as the movie ''Office Space" and the comic strip ''Dilbert."

Companies often ''waste space tremendously," he said in an interview posted on the web by a Canadian organization. He added, ''There's been a lot of effort to rethink the office, providing a club-like space where people meet and not just a train station where they pass by each other. . . . Too many times, people feel like they're just passing through or not interacting much, and that's alienating."

At Friday's service in Harvard's Memorial Church, his students spoke, often through tears, of the impact he had on them during their time at Harvard and the direction of their lives. Dr. Stone, they said, taught classes in avocation, not memorization.

Earlier, a poem by Dexter Dunphy, one of Dr. Stone's oldest and best friends, was read. Alluding to his many travels and penchant for keeping in touch by e-mail, it began with the stanza:

I could always find youFrom halfway across the worldI could always find you

The poem concluded:The only place I can find you nowis in my own hurt and angry heart