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People, Places, and Mathematics

Part of the book series: Springer Biographies ((SPRINGERBIOGS))

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Abstract

In the Autumn of 1982 I enrolled at the University of Warwick, living for the first year in ‘International House’, a small modern residence near the centre of the campus, intended for international students. We had somehow arranged for a small tea chest to be left with distant relatives who lived nearby, so I started with more than a single suitcase of belongings. Included in this box was a basic soldering gun and an electric meter, both of them still in use. These were of course gifts from our father; our mother with a different sense of what is important practically gave me a raincoat and a small suitcase when I first left Swaziland.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There is no universal terminology for the components of higher education even within some institutions. I have chosen to ignore the actual words used at the time and arbitrarily chosen ‘programme’ or ‘course’ for an entire degree and ‘module’ for a specific topic component.

  2. 2.

    I am neither competent nor eager to add more words to the contested territory surrounding the so-called ‘ABC conjecture’. A non-expert view is something like this. ABC is a simple to state conjecture in number theory with enormous implications and many important consequences. There is a published proof in a special issue of Publications of the Research Institute for Mathematical Studies of Kyoto University. Serious questions have been raised about parts of the argument, and the community of experts in anabelian geometry is split on the question of whether they have been addressed adequately. An anonymous commentator called HM on one of the blogs discussing this expressed the state of the issue particularly neatly: ‘Does it become a political statement whether one assumes ABC?’

  3. 3.

    Class field theory is a branch of number theory that describes certain extensions of fields using objects connected to the field. In ‘local’ class field theory the group of units of the local field plays a central role. In ‘global’ class field theory, the idele class group takes on the role of the group of units. The terminology of idele (or idèle) for an ‘ideal element’ (or id.el.), and ‘adele’ (adèle) for ‘additive idele’ was coined by the French mathematician Claude Chevalley in the 1930s [48]. The power of these ideas is that they enable all possible completions of the field to be considered simultaneously and on an equal footing.

  4. 4.

    A ‘listed’ building in England means one that has been placed on the statutory list maintained by a non-departmental public body of the Government called Historic England. This is done for buildings of particular architectural or historic interest, and means that it may not be demolished, extended, or altered without special permission.

  5. 5.

    An introduction to some of these surprising identities and directions may be found in work of David Boyd [32] and Christopher Deninger [68].

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  1. Durham, UK

    Thomas Ward

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Ward, T. (2023). Coventry. In: People, Places, and Mathematics. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39074-6_5

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