I hadn't been there very long when I was shocked to learn that Leonard Eisenbud's "Q" clearance was in jeopardy: he had received an "interrogatory" asking him to respond to a broad range of questions about his and his wife's political affiliations. It was no secret that Ruth-Jean's mother and sister were members of the Communist Party, and the charges against Leonard began and wandered off from there. Indignant and dispirited, and believing the probability of his receiving clearance to be vanishingly small, Leonard chose not to pursue it to the stage of formal hearings and left to accept an appointment at the Bartol Research Foundation in Swarthmore, PA.

He was a great figure, and very important for me personally.

While I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago (1967-1970), I listened at every chance I got to the beautiful lectures of Irving Kaplansky. He was then just finishing his book 'Commutative Rings', and lectured from it. I admired him and it a great deal, but - in the style of a rebellious adolescent - I was quite ready to proclaim that a lot was left out.

In the fall of 1971, visiting at the University of Leeds in England, I had a chance to lecture on ... Noether normalization (in a version borrowed from Nagata's book, 'Local Rings').

... thoroughly enjoying the French for their mathematics, culture, and good life. ... About half way through that year I was invited by Wolfgang Vogel, whom I had never met, to come to Halle, in East Germany, to visit, give a lecture, and discuss mathematics. ... A refugee from neighbouring Leipzig when she was five, my wife hadn't been back since then and came along. The trip seemed exotic and slightly risky. We had plenty of adventures that first visit! On the train from Leipzig to Halle my wallet - with my passport - mysteriously disappeared from my coat, a loss that we discovered as soon as I tried to check in at the University guest house.

David Eisenbud's research accomplishments extend broadly through algebra and its applications. His publications (over a hundred of them!) have made significant contributions to fundamental issues in the subject. David also has a marvelous gift for mathematical collaboration. The sweep of his interests and the intensity of his mathematical interactions have brought him into fruitful co-authorship with many mathematicians of different backgrounds and different viewpoints.

Shortly after his graduate days, David began a joint project with Buchsbaum. Among other things, they established an elegant geometric criterion for exactness of a finite free complex that has many applications in the homological study of commutative rings. ... In the middle 1970s David worked with Harold Levine on the topology of finite C∞ map germs ... V I Arnold once referred to [the] celebrated formula of Eisenbud-Levine, which links calculus, algebra and geometry, as a "paradigm" more than a theorem that provides a local manifestation of interesting global invariants and that "would please Poincaré and Hilbert (also Euler, Cauchy and Kronecker, to name just those classical mathematicians, whose works went in the same direction)." Given this early work, it was natural for David's attention to turn to the study of singularities and their topology. In this period, David wrote a book with the topologist Walter Neumann [a son of Bernhard Neumann and Hanna Neumann] on the topology of the complements of the sort of knots that appear in the theory of plane-curve singularities. David next became interested in algebraic geometry, beginning a long and important collaboration with Joe Harris. Together, they developed the theory of Limit Linear Series and used it to solve a number of classical problems about the moduli spaces of complex algebraic curves.

MSRI is a large operation, with about 1,300 visitors coming through each year and about 85 in residence at any one time. It is also large in terms of its coverage of mathematics. Over the years it has hosted programs in mathematical economics, mathematical biology, string theory, and statistics, as well as in a wide variety of areas in pure mathematics. Indeed, Eisenbud notes that a distinctive feature of MSRI in the world of mathematics institutes is its combination of pure and applied areas. As he puts it, "We have continued to have a fundamental emphasis, and we mix it with applied areas."

Eisenbud is looking forward not only to being the director of MSRI but also to being a mathematician there. "My own work has involved a number of different fields, and I like learning mathematics a lot," he remarks. "So I feel that I'll profit personally by the flow of mathematics through there, as well as helping the Institute."

David has served the mathematical community as chair of the mathematics department at Brandeis, on advisory and evaluation committees for the National Science Foundation, as a member of the Board on Mathematical Sciences, and as vice president of the AMS. But his service that is most visible nationally and internationally has been as director of MSRI, where he moved in 1997 after twenty-seven years at Brandeis. A fundamental strength of mathematicians is their ability to generalize, and I believe that David's performance as AMS president can be predicted with high accuracy by generalizing from his success at MSRI. In fact, his leadership at MSRI exemplifies the qualities needed by the AMS president. With David as its director, MSRI has continued its tradition of superlative programs in fundamental mathematics while simultaneously expanding into a broader and more diverse selection of fields. David has furthered a deliberate policy of outreach into new areas, and MSRI's influence and reputation increasingly extend beyond core mathematics into areas on the boundaries between mathematics and science as well as into applications ranging from imaging to cryptography to finance.

This book is intended to introduce basic notions of modern algebraic geometry. These are schemes in general, affine schemes, projective schemes and the functor of points. The authors discuss the motivation behind most of their definitions and give many examples. The reader who works through them will become comfortable with schemes as far as flatness and characterization of a space by its functor of points are concerned, as well as with the notion itself. These topics are important in the developing field of noncommutative geometry, where scheme-theoretic thinking is involved, and this book provides a good exposition for students.

With so many texts on commutative algebra available, one's reaction to this one might be "Why yet another one?", and "Why is it so fat?" The answer to the second question answers the first as well - this text has a distinctively different flavour than existing texts, both in coverage and style. Motivation and intuitive explanations appear throughout, there are many worked examples, and both text and problem sets lead up to contemporary research.

Eisenbud's book was designed with several purposes in mind. One was to provide an updated text on basic commutative algebra reflecting the intense activity in the field during the author's life. Another was to provide algebraic geometers, commutative algebraists, computational geometers, and other users of commutative algebra with a book where they could find results needed in their fields, especially those pertaining to algebraic geometry. But even more, Eisenbud felt that there was a great need for a book which did not present pure commutative algebra leaving the underlying geometry behind. In his introduction he writes, "It has seemed to me for a long time that commutative algebra is best practised with knowledge of the geometric ideas that played a great role in its formation: in short, with a view toward algebraic geometry."

... is a wonderful introduction to the way of looking at algebraic geometry introduced by Alexandre Grothendieck and his school. The style of this book, however, differs greatly from that of Bourbaki; it is not formal and systematic, but friendly and inviting .... Thus this book introduces big ideas with seemingly simple, concrete examples, generalizes from them to an appropriate abstract formulation, and then applies the concept to interesting classical problems in a meaningful way. It is a pleasure to read.

My interests outside mathematics include hiking, juggling, and, above all, music. Originally a flutist, I now spend most of my musical time singing art-songs (Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Debussy, ...).