My early life as a mathematician.

Revised 22 January 2016.

In 1965, I received my Ph.D. at Duke University based on a dissertation about polynomials over finite fields. My advisor was Leonard Carlitz.

In Carlitz’s algebra course, the textbook was Van der Waerden’s Algebra. It is way too old-fashioned to be used nowadays, but it did indeed present post-Noether type abstract algebra. Carlitz also had me read large chunks of Martin Weber’s Lehrbuch der Algebra, written in German in 1895 (so totally not post-Noether) and published using Fraktur. A few years ago one of my sons asked me to retype the words to some of the songs written in Fraktur in a German-American shape note book in Roman type (but still in German), which I did. This was for German teachers in the Concordia Language Villages to use with their students. I sometimes wonder if I am the last person on earth able to read Fraktur fluently.

I learned mathematical logic from Joe Shoenfield from his dittoed notes that later became an excellent textbook. I rediscovered Craig’s Trick while working on problem he gave. That considerably strengthened my sense of self-worth.

I accepted a job at Western Reserve University, now Case Western Reserve University, where I stayed until I retired in 1999. In the few years after 1965, I wrote several papers about finite fields. They are all summarized in the book Finite Fields, by Rudolf Lidl and Harald Niederreiter.

I was almost immediately attracted to category theory and to computing science, both of which Carlitz hated. I did not let that stop me. (Now is the time to say, Follow The Beat of your Own Drum or some such cliché.)

Early on, Paul Dedecker was at CWRU briefly, and from him I learned about sheaves, cribles and the like. This inspired me to take part in an algebraic geometry summer school at Bowdoin College, where I learned from lectures by David Mumford and by reading his Red Book when it was still red.

Because one of the papers in finite fields showed that certain types of permutation polynomials formed wreath products of groups, I also pursued group theory, in particular by taking part in the finite group theory summer school at Bowdoin in 1970.

During that time I pored over Beck’s thesis on cohomology, which with the group theory I had learned resulted in my paper Automorphisms of group extensions. That paper has the most citations of all my research papers.

In the early days, I had several graduate students. All of them worked in group theory. One of them, Shair Ahmad, went on to produce several Ph.D. students, all in differential equations and dynamical systems.

One thing I can brag about is that I never ever told him I hated differential equations or dynamical systems. In fact, I didn’t hate either one. There were people in the department in both fields and they made me jealous the way they could model real life phenomena with those tools. One relevant point about that is that I was a liberal arts math major from Oberlin before going to Duke and had had very few courses in any kind of science. This made me very different from most people in the department, who has B.S. undergrad degrees.

In those days, John Isbell and Peter Hilton were in the math department at CWRU for awhile, which boosted my knowledge and interest in category theory. Hilton arranged for me to spend a year at the E.T.H. in Zürich, where I met Michael Barr. I eventually wrote two books on category theory with him. But that is getting away from Early Days, so I will stop here.

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