Kunihiko kodaira biography of christopher

Springer has just published an autobiography of Goro Shimura, entitled The Map of My Life. Shimura’s specialty is the arithmetic theory of modular forms, and he’s responsible for a crucial construction generalizing the modular curve, now known as a “Shimura variety”. The book has a long section at the beginning about his childhood and experiences during the war in Japan. The rest deals mostly with his career as a mathematician, including often unflattering commentary on his colleagues. One of those who comes off the best is André Weil, who encouraged and supported Shimura’s work from the beginning. They both ended up at Princeton, with Weil at the Institute, Shimura at the University.

The book contains extensive discussion of the story of what Shimura calls “my conjecture”. This is the conjecture proved by Wiles and others that implies Fermat’s Last Theorem. In the past, it has conventionally been referred to by various combinations of the names of Shimura, Taniyama and Weil, although more recently the convention seems to be to refer to it as the “modularity theorem”. Shimura also claims credit for conjecturing the “Woods Hole formula” that inspired Atiyah and Bott to prove thei

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