I Want to Be A Mathematician: An Automathography

I. Student.- 1 Reading and writing and’ rithmetic.- Words.- Books.- Writing.- Languages.- Numbers.- Study or worry.- Learning English.- High school.- 2 A college education.- Move to Chambana.- How not to be a freshman.- Trig and analyt.- Calculus, and is there a doctor on the faculty?.- Elementary mathematics and culture.- Mathematical daydreams and BARBARA.- All Gaul.- A Bachelor of Science.- 3 Graduate school.- Statistics.- The end of the affair.- Matrices.- The Dean.- First class.- Hazlett and Netzorg.- Good morning, analysis.- Why geometry?.- 4 Learning to study.- Doob arrives.- All work and politics.- Born again.- Other forces, other tongues.- Prelims.- For example.- Statistics, no.- Readings and ratings.- Reprints: Doob’s and others’.- Study.- 5 Learning to think.- Optional skipping.- Roller coaster.- Jobs, no.- On my own.- The end of an era.- 6 The Institute.- The common room.- The center of the world.- Insignificant people.- Work.- Work and between work.- A weak paper and a pretty good book.- Collaboration.- Measures and Harvard.- Classical mechanics.- Birthdays.- 7 Winning the war.- Back home in Illinois.- Meetings.- Teaching at Syracuse.- Research at Syracuse.- Radiation Laboratory.- Referee and review.- From Syracuse to Chicago.- II. Scholar.- 8 A great university.- Eckhart Hall.- Days of glory.- What makes a great university?.- Teaching.- Students and visitors.- 9 The early years.- Guggenheim.- Measure Theory.- Master’s exams.- Judgments.- Jimmie Savage.- Students and courses.- The beginning of Hilbert space.- Ph.D. students.- The Cambridge Congress.- Follow the sun.- 10 Montevideo.- Where to go?.- Saturation in Spanish.- Room and board.- Weather and climate.- How to get a chair.- Humanities and sciences.- Faculty of engineering.- Instituto de Matemca.- Institute people.- Teaching in Montevideo.- Research in Uruguay.- Spy, junior grade.- Small memories.- 11 The fabulous fifties.- Back home.- Is formal logic mathematics?.- Boolean logic.- The road to polyadic algebras.- All logic and all mathematics.- Logic students and logicians.- The passport saga.- Service.- Editing.- How to be a big shot.- How to be an editor.- Recent progress in ergodic theory.- Writing for a living.- The Institute again.- Boolean algebras and sets.- Farewell.- III. Senior.- 12 How to teach.- Shifting gears.- The Moore method.- Moore and covering material.- How to be a pro.- Musings on teaching.- How to supervise.- More Ph.D. students.- 13 To Sydney, to Moscow, and back.- Sydney 1964.- Budapest 1964.- Scotland 1965.- Tourist in Moscow and Leningrad.- Life with Anosov.- Fomin and Gelfand.- Mathematicians in Moscow.- As others see us.- 14 How to do almost everything.- Rejections.- How to do research.- The invariant subspace problem.- Friends can help.- How to recommend.- How to advise.- Honolulu, here I come!.- 15 Service, one way or another.- Democracy ad absurdum.- How to be a chairman.- How not to be a chairman.- Life in Bloomington.- Indiana students.- Committees of one: Wabash.- Committees of one: Bulletin.- The Monthly.- Here and there.- How to write mathematics.- How to write about von Neumann.- How to write history?.- Coda How to be a mathematician.- Index of Photographs.