Events Surrounding the Birth of the Kobayashi Metric

Abstract

I first met Sho in 1962 in one of the AMS Summer Institutes in Santa Barbara. I had just finished my first year as a graduate student at MIT and he told me he was on his way to Berkeley. We ended up being colleagues for 47 years when I myself got to Berkeley in 1965. Although as colleagues we could not help but run into each other often, I think it was in the ten or so years from 1980 to 1990 that I had extended contact with him every week, when he drove me home after each differential geometry seminar late in the day on Friday.We had to walk a bit before we could get to his car and that gave us even more of a chance to chat and gossip. I am afraid the intellectual quality of the conversations was not particularly high, but the entertainment value was off the charts. It was most enjoyable. However, the one thing that has stuck in my mind about Sho all these years is probably the fortuitous confluence of events surrounding the discovery of the Kobayashi metric in 1966.