But why me? To answer that question, let me first note an incident that happened in the fall of 1964. Did he do such a thing to other people? Unlikely, though I really don’t know. ( he then describes an encounter in which Harish-Chandra compares favorably Apery’s result on the irrationality of ζ (3) to Shimura’s work.)Ĭlearly he thought he finally found something with which he could humiliate me: To his disappointment, he failed. I can narrate many stories about this in detail, but that would be unpleasant and unnecessary, and so I mention only one interesting case… In spite of the fact that my mathematical work was little understood by the general mathematical public, I was often the target of jealousy by other mathematicians, which I found strange. I now believe that his “attack” on me was caused by his jealousy towards my supposed “success” - my conjectural formula and lectures - at Woods Hole…. As described in my letter to Freydoon Shahidi, included as Section A2 in this book, he once tried to humiliate me, and as a result gave me the chance to state my conjectures about rational elliptic curves. Much later I formed an opinion that he had been frustrated and sour for most of his life.

Somebody told me that he had become frustrated and even sour. Jean-Pierre Serre, whom I had met in Tokyo and Paris, was among the audience, and kept asking questions on the most trivial points, which naturally annoyed me…. To get a flavor of the unusual nature of the book, here are some extracts from one section: Shimura also claims credit for conjecturing the “Woods Hole formula” that inspired Atiyah and Bott to prove their general fixed-point 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”. This is the conjecture proved by Wiles and others that implies Fermat’s Last Theorem. The book contains extensive discussion of the story of what Shimura calls “my conjecture”. They both ended up at Princeton, with Weil at the Institute, Shimura at the University. One of those who comes off the best is André Weil, who encouraged and supported Shimura’s work from the beginning. The rest deals mostly with his career as a mathematician, including often unflattering commentary on his colleagues. The book has a long section at the beginning about his childhood and experiences during the war in Japan. 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”. Springer has just published an autobiography of Goro Shimura, entitled The Map of My Life.

The Map of My Life by Goro Shimura