Academics

Abstract

The time I spent on political organizing during the spring of 1972 did not cause me any academic difficulties. Professor Phillip Griffiths, to whom I was initially assigned as an advisee, was about to move to Harvard; and in any case my main interest was number theory, which was not his field. He suggested that the best person for me to work with was Nicholas Katz, a newly-tenured expert on arithmetic algebraic geometry — a field that uses algebraic techniques and geometric intuition to solve problems in number theory. Katz was in France in 1971–1972, and I wrote to him asking for suggestions for what I should read so as to be better prepared when he returned. He sent me a list of articles, a few of which I read quickly and several of which I found to be too difficult. Other than reading what I could from Katz’s list, I had no academic obligations until the autumn.