Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: The broad span of John Coates's mathematical work, including his intellectual delights and his talent for inspiring and mentoring generations of mathematicians, was a gift to all of us.His energy and his generosity of thought, his appreciation of ideas, and his friendship were evident from the earliest days that I knew him.In 1969, he came to Harvard as a Benjamin Peirce Assistant Professor.There, as he wrote in his memorial to John Tate, the "very cramped quarters," its "physical smallness," and "tiny coffee room or corridors between the offices" offered him an environment that made it easy to interact with people.He was introduced by Tate to aspects of mathematics that would lead him to the area in which he would make some of his later great contributions.As Steve Lichtenbaum recounts ( §2), John Coates had started in the analytic number theoretic terrain of Kurt Mahler, algebraic approximation, and 𝑝-adic Thue, Roth and Baker methods, moving to the scheme theoretic terrain of Grothendieck's Langage des Schémas, before connecting with his true passion, the core of algebraic number theory and the construction of bridges between analysis and arithmetic: the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, and Iwasawa theory.
DOI: 10.1090/noti2844
Institution: Harvard University
Language: English
Subfield: Algebra and Number Theory
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4389748847