Academic Background
After getting my PhD at the University of Chicago in 1970, I taught at Brandeis University for twenty-seven years, with sabbaticals in Paris, Bonn, and Berkeley. In 1997 I became Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley; at the same time I joined the faculty of UC Berkeley as Professor of Mathematics.As Director of MSRI from 1997 to 2007, I had the satisfaction of supporting a huge amount of mathematics and related activity at the Institute. From 2003 to 2005 I was also President of the American Mathematical Society, an organization I came to admire a great deal. I was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.
Robert Bryant succeeded me as Director of MSRI in 2007, and from then until the fall of 2012 I divided my time between teaching at Berkeley and working as the first Director of Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the Simons Foundation in New York, where I initiated the public programs in Mathematics, Theoretical Physics, and Theoretical Computer Science.
I returned to MSRI in the year 2012-13 as an organizer of the year-long program on Commutative Algebra, and became Director of MSRI again in August, 2013, in which role I served until August, 2022. I have now gone "back" to teaching as Professor in the department of mathematics at UC Berkeley.
When I applied to become the Director of MSRI I wrote to the hiring committee saying that, while the strength of MSRI's scientific program was already recognized around the world, I felt that MSRI badly needed two things: a physical facility worthy of such a world-class institution (and in particular a better auditorium); and an endowment that could enable long-term planning and protect the institution from possible future fluctuations in NSF support, which was essentially the only source of funding at the time.
Now, in my retirement from the directorship, I have the satisfaction of
having helped bring about both of these changes: The renovation and
extension of the building to approximately twice its original size
was accomplished in 2006, near the end of my first two terms, and a
centerpiece of the construction was the beautiful and airy Simons auditorium,
where Roger Penrose gave the inaugural lecture in 2006
Jim Simons made the first substantial contribution to the Endowment, including the establishment of the "Eisenbud Professorship" at MSRI, at my retirement party in 2007. I undertook a major endowment campaign in my fourth term, and as I leave MSRI, its endowment stands at about $130 million; the extraordinary generosity of the lead gifts made by Jim and Marilyn Simons and matched by Henry and Marsha Laufer, led to the renaming of MSRI as the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute, or SLMath for short.
Biography
MacTutor Biography
Souvenirs from my four terms as Director of MSRI:
-
Interview when I became Director
-
MSRI's Twentieth Anniversary
-
Nomination for President of the AMS, by Barry
Mazur and Margaret Wright
-
Interview after I was elected
-
AMS/MSRI Congressional Luncheon
-
Congressional Testimony
-
Opinion Piece about Washington's lack of attention to Science
-
Reflections on my Presidency
-
Eisenbud Professorship
created by Jim Simons at MSRI.
Souvenirs from my four terms as Director of MSRI:
- Interview when I became Director
- MSRI's Twentieth Anniversary
- Nomination for President of the AMS, by Barry Mazur and Margaret Wright
- Interview after I was elected
- AMS/MSRI Congressional Luncheon
-
Congressional Testimony
- Opinion Piece about Washington's lack of attention to Science
- Reflections on my Presidency
- Eisenbud Professorship created by Jim Simons at MSRI.
-
MSRI's biggest outreach projects on my watch were the National Math Festivals
held in the spring of 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2021 as joint projects with the Institute for Advanced Study. I worked very closely with MSRI staffmember Kirsten Bohl, whose energy, skill, and sensitivity made these programs a great success,
each one drawing over 12,000 kids and adults to the Washington Convention Center. Here is a typical scene:
I wrote a piece for the AMS notices
Op-Ed piece
to spread the word, and there were articles
from The New Yorker
and
from the MAA Focus
that appeared afterwards. Kirsten Bohl and I co-authored a
piece with
pictures, that appeared in the April 2021 Notices of the AMS just before
the last of the festivals.
Activities Outside Berkeley
Organizational
I remain connected to the Simons Foundation as member, since 2012, of its Board of Directors; and I have been on the Board of Directors of Math for America since its inception in 2004.
I helped found the Journal of Algebra and Number Theory in 2006, and the Journal of Software for Algebra and Geometry in 2009, and I'm Chair of the Editorial Board of the former. I'm also an editor of Springer-Verlag's book series Graduate Texts in Mathematics and Algorithms and Computation in Mathematics
While President of the AMS I helped plan the
Math Research Communities Program,
and chaired its advisory board for several years.
Current Events Bulletin at the Winter AMS Meeting
Since 2004 I've been organizing a session at each of the Winter
AMS meetings on Current Events in Mathematics. The format is simple:
four accessible 50-minute lectures on some of the most interesting
pure and applied mathematics of the last few years, presented by people
who are speaking on the work of others. The inspiration is of course the
famous Bourbaki Seminar, but the aim is to be broader and represent a
wider range of mathematics, particularly on the applied side.
A
booklet with writeups of the talks is permanently available
online. Almost all of them become articles in the
Bulletin of
the American Mathematical Society afterwards.
Research Interests
My first paper was about permutation groups, and my thesis and subsequent few papers on non-commutative ring theory (my thesis advisors were Saunders MacLane and, unofficially, the English ring-theorist J.C. Robson.) I turned to commutative algebra, and subsequently to singularity theory, knot theory, and algebraic geometry. My papers also include one on a statistical application of algebraic geometry and one on juggling. Recently I've worked on the homological aspects of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry; and on computational tools for these fields:
Ever since the early 70s I've used computers to produce examples in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, and I've developed algorithms to extend the power of computation in this area. In 2009 I joined Mike Stillman and Dan Grayson as Co-PI on the grant to (further) develop the Macaulay2 system for symbolic computation. Some of the papers I'm proudest of were partly inspired by computations with that system.
Recreation
My interests outside mathematics include hiking, juggling, and, above all, music. Originally a flutist, I now spend most of my musical time singing art-songs (Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Debussy, ...) I broke down and bought a digital camera in November 2001, and you can find some of the results (alas, not up-to-date!) on my photo page.CV, Papers, Students
- CV
- Students (listing at the Mathematical Genealogy Project)
- Electronic copies of some of my papers; others are at the arXiv
- Beamer presentations. It seems I make these once a year, for talks at the winter AMS meetings. I strongly prefer blackboards for communication, but it is nice to have a permanent record.
- My mathematical genealogy from the Mathematical Genealogy Project
Saunders Mac Lane: In Memoriam
Saunders Mac Lane died on April 14, 2005. He was my thesis advisor---Irving Kaplansky was his first student, I was nearly his last; perhaps John Thompson is the most illustrious. I wrote a preface that contains some of my favorite stories about him for his Autobiography, which was originally published by AK Peters. He was a great figure, and very important for me personally.
David Buchsbaum
David Buchsbaum was my postdoctoral mentor at Brandeis, and we worked closely together for most of the first 10 years
of my career. In addition to math, we spent a lot of time discussing department and university politics, and the
history of the math department, great preparation for my future administrative activity.
When he died in January 2021, at the age of 91, his former student Jerzy Weyman and I collected reminiscences from
many of David's friends and students, and published them along with lots of photos in
Remembering David Buchsbaum,
which was published in the
Notices of the American Mathematical Society.