Joseph J. Rotman

I was born in Chicago during the Depression. Both my parents had immigrated

to the US in the 1920s: my mother from Romania; my father from Russia. I am

in awe of their courage: neither spoke English; their families were poor; neither

had much formal education (my mother arrived at age 12; my father age 17).

They met in Michigan (my mother's family lived in Detroit; my dad's in Chicago).

That I was born in America and not in Europe of that time was one of their great

gifts to me: not only did I avoid the Holocaust, but I grew up in a freer society.

When I graduated high school, I won a scholarship that paid tuition and

expenses for four years to a college of my choice. For some reason, Northwestern

was my first choice, but they refused to admit me because, at that time, they had

a quota on Jewish students (their admission application would be illegal today); this

quota did not extend to their faculty, two of whom where Rosenberg and Zelinsky.

Lucky for me, my second choice was the University of Chicago. I will argue that,

in the 1950s, their math department was one of the world's best (including Mac Lane,

Weil, Chern, Zygmund, Marshall Stone, Kaplansky, Spanier, Halmos). Some of my

student contemporaries were Paul Cohen, John Thompson, Steve Schanuel, and Hyman Bass. My thesis advisor was Kaplansky; my thesis was about abelian groups. Homological algebra and category theory were very active at Chicago, and I was around when Auslander,

Buchsbaum, and Serre proved their beautiful theorems about regular local rings.

My first position was as research associate (nowadays it's called a post-doc) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Some excellent algebraists there at the time were Suzuki, Reiner, and Heller. I've spent all my career there, with several (sabbatical) years

off for good behavior (London, Oxford, Israel; I met my wife in Jerusalem). I wrote my

first book (group theory) when Michio Suzuki encouraged me to teach a graduate course

(of course, he was a world class expert). Moreover, Bill Boone had recently joined the

faculty, and he encouraged me to include a solution of the word problem. Roger Lyndon's

review of my book in Math Reviews was so kind that I felt I might write more. I'm

now emeritus, but I still enjoy writing.