Notes for obituary 1. Reid, Miles Anthony 2. Date and place of birth: 30th Jan 1948, Hoddesdon, England 3. Parentage: Father: John Rollo Reid, accountant, lived half his life in France Mother: Edna Mary Reid (born Frost), school teacher; from Barnsley, educated at Bangor teacher training college 3rd of 5 children, with older sister Allison, older brother Rollo, younger brother Landon and younger sister Cilla 4. Ancestry: Family name probably Scottish, from Edinburgh (?). Grandfather was an adventurer and engineer, who founded John Reid and Sons, Structural steel (still run by my older brother Rollo). 5. Marriage: Married 30th Jan 1978 Nayo (born Hagino) from Toyota, Aichi-ken, Japan 3 daughters: Tiger Mary Hideko Reid (born 13th Dec 1982 in Coventry) Ryuko Elizabeth Reid (born 26th Jun 1985 in Coventry, Ryu is Dragon) Edna Murasaki Wolf Reid "Saki" (born 10th Jul 1989 in Kyoto) 6. Childhood: Brought up in France from age 4 until age 12. Genteel middle class British background (even when we lived in France), but no real background in science. We had a chemistry set for Christmas when I was about 9, and my older brother taught me how to make and set off various home-made explosives. 7. Schools: Primary school at Maison-Lafitte in the Paris suburbs. One item of schooling was outstanding: at that time, French primary schools made a magnificent job of teaching French grammar, with subjunctive constructions, parsing of sentences, relative clauses, past participles agreeing in number and gender with the direct object they apply to, etc. This truly wonderful gift of language training has been with me throughout my career. Secondary school: Petit Lyc'ee Condorcet, rue d'Amsterdam, Paris for 15 months to age 12 Grammar school: Bournemouth School for Boys, Jan 1961-1966 Math, phys, chem. The teaching environment was stimulating, although none of the teachers was outstanding. I was a disruptive student, and came into frequent conflict with teachers. I was in a hurry to leave school and go to university, and applied to Cambridge against the wishes of the school before A level, while in 2nd year 6th form (= high school) (at that time it was still traditional to stay on for a 3rd year in 6th form to apply to Oxbridge). Chemistry was mostly valency, balancing equations, the Periodic Table and so on, little bit of quantitative and organic stuff and lots of lab work. Physics involved a considerable use of calculus, including the ideas of velocity as a vector, magnetic field as a vector field, instantaneous velocity as a limit over shorter and shorter time intervals. We played with oscilloscopes in the lab, and the teaching included quite a lot of hints about trig functions and Fourier series. Perhaps the main influence was the fact that everyone I knew at school was also studying math, phys and chem, with the intention of continuing to do science at university. I was a self-taught mathematician from age 14--15 onwards; by a miracle my father happened to have a copy of [Hall and Knight, Higher algebra], and I worked through it, doing most of the exercises for fun. The book did lots of things: working with surds, the theory of equations (proto Galois theory), infinite series, log and exponential functions, etc.; it is also fortunate that there was no-one to tell me that the book was completely outdated and all the stuff about infinite series was not rigorous, etc. Especially after winning a place at Trinity College, Cambridge in Dec of my last year at school, I bought all the books on the Cambridge precourse reading list, and read all kinds of things with various levels of understanding, e.g., books on Riemannian geometry with Christoffel symbols. Hermann Bondi gave a series of ten televised lectures "E=mc^2: Thinking relativity through" from the Royal Institution 5th Oct--7th Dec 1963. This was possibly the only area of research or black magic clearly visible to a high school student at the time, and my interest in Riemannian geometry was probably motivated by General Relativity. 8. University: Trinity College Cambridge, 1966-69 At Trinity, I did the 2nd year Part IB in my first year (6 or 8 students did the same in my year). I never studied very hard or effectively, getting through the Part IB and Part II exams on native intelligence. I came badly unstuck in the Cambridge Part III, with bare pass marks, and I would not have survived into the Cambridge PhD program without pushing by various people (I conjecture Alan Baker, Swinnerton-Dyer and the chairman of DPMMS, Hodge). Cambridge gave me various kinds of teaching and supervision, but possibly the most important influences were Jeffrey Goldstone and Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who encouraged me to continue to think for myself and not to take the technical details too seriously. I was a keen participant in all the Cambridge u/g math societies (and in turn secretary and president of Trinity Math Soc.), and went to many popular lectures on all kinds of topics in math and physics, e.g., Dennis Sciama on quasars and general relativity, John Polkinghorne on quarks and what became the standard model. At that time, Cambridge taught a huge variety of subjects, e.g., in Part II: analysis in Banach spaces (before partial derivatives), things like Maxwell's equations and thermodynamics as well as Galois theory, algebraic topology and Hodge's notorious lectures on differential geometry (with Christoffel symbols mixed up with connections, parallel transport, and de Rham cohomology). I have subsequently reworked for myself every piece of pure math that was paraded before me during my u/g career, so I have little memory left of any of it as it actually happened. The applied stuff still provides indispensable motivation for understanding pure math (e.g., div, grad and curl and integrating Green's functions for electromagnetism, with no pretence at rigour, is a huge advantage in understanding de Rham and Hodge cohomology). Quantum field theory was largely responsible for my near-disaster in Part III. Already as an undergraduate, I developed the life-long defence mechanism of sleeping in lectures. 9. Postgraduate studies: Cambridge 1969--70, IHES 1970--72 When DPMMS took me on as a graduate student, I was supposed to study with Frank Adams, but he hadn't yet arrived from Manchester, so I was given a free rein. I had to learn spectral sequences in order to be a student of Frank Adams (famous for the Adams spectral sequence), so I got involved in black magic called Abelian categories and sheaf theory, and via that algebraic geometry. Swinnerton-Dyer advised me to read Mumford's little red book. Jean-Louis Colliot-Th'el`ene spent that year in Cambridge, and we ran joint seminars, first on Serre's famous book Corps Locaux, then on various things in algebraic geometry, including Mumford's red book. Since Grothendieck was the source of the most prominent black magic at the time, I quickly formed the desire to study in Paris. At the British Math Colloquium in York that year, Swinnerton-Dyer introduced me to J-P. Serre, who told me that Grothendieck was no longer taking students, and advised me to go to Deligne. I visited Paris in May 1970 to meet Deligne, attending the Bourbaki seminar (at which Deligne lectured on Shimura varieties). Deligne told me to read about Hodge theory from Griffiths' papers and K3 surfaces from the Shafarevich seminar. In summer 1970, I met Mumford in Cambridge, went to the Oslo Nordic summer school and the Nice International Congress of Mathematicians. Looking back on this period, it is hard not to be struck by the catalogue of disasters averted and extraordinary strokes of good luck in being directed into my subject. At IHES, Deligne told me to study the Torelli problem for K3 surfaces. The problem was much too hard for me -- it was only solved in the way Deligne wanted (together with surjectivity of the Torelli map) about 10 years later, after many developments and several errors (some of them published). How I went on from this to become a 3-folder is described in detail in my autobiographical paper ["25 years of 3-folds -- an old person's view", in Explicit birational geometry of 3-folds, A. Corti and M. Reid (eds.), CUP 2000, 313--343.] In the 2 years in Paris I was exposed to a quite extraordinary spectrum of math activities -- the courses at Orsay and Deligne's lectures at the IHES, the Bourbaki seminars and Serre's lecture courses at College de France, lectures by visitors to Paris such as Van de Ven, Bombieri and Hirzebruch. I also spent 3 months at the Warwick symposium run by Mumford in summer 1971, meeting Mike Artin, Seshadri, C.P. Ramanujam, Bombieri and many others. In passing, I absorbed from Deligne, Artin and Van de Ven the ideas of the classification of surfaces, and especially from Bombieri the problem of Godeaux surfaces, which later grew into one of the main preoccupations and sources of inspiration of my career. During the time in Paris, I learnt German and Russian at various evening classes run on the Orsay campus. After about 6 months of Russian, I volunteered to translate a substantial paper by Manin on Iwasawa theory and modular curves. I learned a huge amount of math from the paper itself, and the red ink on my work by the editor Kurt Hirsch taught me a lot about math style and the rights and duties of a translator. 9a. Postdoctoral positions In the six years between my thesis in Jun 1972 and my permanent employment at Warwick in Oct 1978, I held a research fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge, which I intermitted with 2 years in the Soviet Union on British Council exchanges, one year in Japan as a Royal Society visiting fellow, and 5 months at the Univ. of Erlangen. I had many mathematical and cultural reasons for wanting to visit Russia, beyond the fact that I had no prospect of employment when I was finishing my PhD. 10. Appointments: see my CV on www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/~miles/Personal/CV 11. Honours: First holder of Tokyo University's endowed chair of Mathematical Theory of Prediction and Control, 1990 2002, FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge) 2002--2003, British Hispanic Foundation "Queen Victoria Eugenia" Chair of Doctoral Studies at the Complutense University, Madrid 12. Views on Education and Science policy Too complicated to summarise here. See my "Collected Sermons", e.g. the 2001 diatribe on Warwick exams www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/~miles/Sermons/diatribe 13. General interests Science and popular science. History of math. Current affairs and human rights. Language, history, culture and science of whatever country I happen to be studying at the time (most recently, Korea, Romania, Australia). Dreams of youth, especially attractive young ladies. Piano, classical music, including 20th century and contemporary; unfortunately, I only started piano around 17, and gave it up for about 15 years after my PhD, before starting again with my kids (all of whom are now much better than me). 14. Possible biographer Jeremy Gray (Open Univ. and Univ. of Warwick) These notes are prepared for biographical memoirs of the Royal Society and are available on www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/~miles/Personal/obituary last modified Jul 2002.