The Map of My Life

Goro Shimura

Dec 2008 · Springer Science & Business Media

About this ebook

In this book, the author writes freely and often humorously about his life, beginning with his earliest childhood days. He describes his survival of American bombing raids when he was a teenager in Japan, his emergence as a researcher in a post-war university system that was seriously deficient, and his life as a mature mathematician in Princeton and in the international academic community. Every page of this memoir contains personal observations and striking stories. Such luminaries as Chevalley, Oppenheimer, Siegel, and Weil figure prominently in its anecdotes.

Goro Shimura is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University. In 1996, he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the American Mathematical Society. He is the author of Elementary Dirichlet Series and Modular Forms (Springer 2007), Arithmeticity in the Theory of Automorphic Forms (AMS 2000), and Introduction to the Arithmetic Theory of Automorphic Functions (Princeton University Press 1971).

About the author

Goro Shimura was born in Hamamatsu, Japan on February 23, 1930. He received a bachelor's degree in 1952 and a doctorate in 1958 from the University of Tokyo. He taught at the University of Tokyo and Osaka University before becoming a visiting professor at Princeton University in 1962. He was a professor at Princeton from 1964 until his retirement in 1999. As a mathematician, his insights provided the foundation for the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem and led to tools widely used in modern cryptography. He wrote more than 100 papers and books including one about Imari porcelain. His memoir, The Map of My Life, was published in 2008. He received several awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979, the Cole Prize for number theory in 1976, the Asahi Prize in 1991, and the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize for lifetime achievement in 1996. He died on May 3, 2019 at the age of 89.