Talk:Jack Morava

Dear Interested Persons in the Wikipedia Community,

I have just {undone} a revision of this page, which removed a sentence as uninformative, on the following grounds:

The sentence in question

``It became his fate to embed the electrode of arithmetic geometry in the pleasure center of algebraic topology''

alludes specifically to Solomon Lefschetz's

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Lefschetz

assertion, in

A page of mathematical autobiography

Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society Volume 74, Number 5 (1968), p. s54 - 879 http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183529916 Mathematical Reviews number (MathSciNet) MR0240803

``As I see it at last, it was my lot to plant the harpoon of algebraic topology into the body of the whale of algebraic geometry.''

Lefschetz is here referring to his work in the 1920s, begun in isolation in the US (in Kansas and Nebraska). Morava's work arguably completed the circle begun by Lefschetz (or: returned the ball), using ideas from algebraic (arithmetic) geometry to advance the study of the homotopy groups of spheres (a central problem in algebraic topology).

Lefschetz's statement also alludes to the loss of both his hands, in the course of his first career as a radiologist. The sentence in question attempts to treat this issue less emotionally and a little more obliquely. I believe the sentence is informative, and should be reinstated. It has stood for several years without the experts in the subject finding any problem with it.

I hope this will be helpful; thanks to all. (:+{)} Drwonmug 18:50, 19 November 2014 (UTC)


 * I assume that the intended meaning of the sentence was that Morava brought ideas from arithmetic geometry into algebraic geometry. But is this actually true?  It needs a reference if so.   Sławomir Biały  (talk) 15:22, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

personal life
I am not sure about the notability of the person, but I am pretty sure that the names of his children should not be in the wikipedia. --192.114.88.67 (talk) 11:22, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Sentence needs rewriting
I almost understood this sentence:

"Under Atiyah’s tutelage Morava concentrated on the relation between K-theory and cobordism, and when Daniel Quillen's work on that subject appeared he saw that ideas of Sergei Novikov implied close connections between the stable homotopy category and the derived category of quasicoherent sheaves on the moduli stack of one-dimensional formal groups; in particular, that the category of spectra is naturally stratified by height."

But clearly, that was not the intention of whoever wrote it. Maybe it should be rewritten so that people like me don't accidentally understand it.50.205.142.50 (talk) 16:33, 7 March 2020 (UTC)