Racism and Apartheid

Abstract

From 1975 to 1979 I was an instructor at Harvard, which for many years had been a center of research in number theory and arithmetic algebraic geometry. The late 1970’s were a good time to be there. In addition to the stars of the field John Tate and Barry Mazur, there were many young researchers. For example, I got to know two of Tate’s graduate students, Dick Gross (with whom I coauthored my most important work of that period, the p-adic formula for Gauss sums) and Joe Buhler (who subsequently visited and gave talks in Seattle when I was at the University of Washington and he was at Reed College in Portland, Oregon). The junior faculty included Andrew Wiles (who later became famous for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem) and David Rohrlich (with whom I wrote a paper on quotients of Fermat curves).