Your primary love has always been number theory and you have written, by one colleague's estimate, over 50 books and monographs [actually over 60], many of them concerned with this topic. Several of your monographs are the only, or nearly the only, book treatments of their important subjects. Your famous theorem in Diophantine equations earned you the distinguished Cole Prize of the American Mathematical Society. Your textbooks also have garnered accolades. Your 'Calculus for undergraduates' went through many editions in the seventies and eighties, and your 'Algebra' textbook is a standard reference in the field. So prodigious are you as a scholar that there are actual jokes in your profession about you. One joke goes: "Someone calls the Yale Mathematics Department, and asks for Serge Lang. The assistant who answers says, 'He can't talk now, he is writing a book. I will put you on hold.'"

In your character, you are uncompromising in your insistence on what you perceive as logical consistency and rhetorical honesty, and you have questioned much received wisdom and many authorities in the external world as well as here at Yale. You are an excellent and deeply caring teacher, and in honour of this several years ago you received the Dylon Hixon Prize for teaching in Yale College. Your students keep in touch with you years after they graduate and one has created an endowed fund in your honour. Among your many monographs there is one called 'The Beauty of Doing Mathematics', a collection of three dialogues you gave in Paris in the '80s. Yale is grateful to you for the passion with which you understand, practice and profess the mathematical arts, and wishes you well as you continue your lifelong engagement with their illimitable splendours.

Lang single-handedly reorganises and revitalises this fundamental and central subject. The book has had an enormous impact.

From now on, Algebra appears with Springer-Verlag, like the rest of my books. With this change, I considered the possibility of a new edition, but decided against it. I view the book as very stable. The only addition which I would make, if starting from scratch, would be some of the algebraic properties of SL(n) and GL(n) (over $\mathbb{R}$ or $\mathbb{C}$), beyond the proof of simplicity in Chapter XIII. As things stood, I just inserted some exercises concerning some aspects which everybody should know.

... a type of language which gives the illusion of science without any of its substance.

I don't like the nonsense that passes for rational discourse so often in our society. I am very much bothered by the inaccuracies, ambiguities, code words, slogans, catch phrases, public relation devices, sweeping generalizations, and stereotypes, which are used (consciously or otherwise) to influence people.

I am bothered by the inability of many to recognize these for what they are. I am bothered by the way people fudge issues, or are unable to clarify them, sometimes because they are inhibited by "collegiality" and other forms of intimidation (sometimes subtle, sometimes not). Most people put up with the nonsense without doing anything about it (unable or unwilling, for whatever reason - inertia, lack, of energy, lack of interest, lack of time, etc.), often falling into cynicism and despair.

I am bothered by the misinformation which gets disseminated uncritically through the media and by the obstructions which prevent correct information from being disseminated. These obstructions come about in many ways - personal, institutional, through self-imposed inhibitions, through external inhibitions, through outright dishonesty, through incompetence - the list is a long one.

I am bothered by the way misinformation, disguised as scholarship, is used in social, political, and educational contexts to affect policy decisions.

I am bothered by the way misinformation is accepted uncritically, and by the way people are unable to recognize it or reject it.