[email to jacob lurie]

hi. my name is james dolan; you may have heard of me in connection with the so-called "baez-dolan conjectures". martin brandenburg has told me how helpful and encouraging you've been to him on occasions.

i consider myself more of a teacher than a researcher but these activities are for me more in harmony than in conflict. in this however i find myself at odds against the mathematical community at large, and combined with the fact that writing is for me an absurdly inefficient form of communication (i've never written a math paper), these are the primary reasons for my failure to obtain academic degrees or academic jobs up till now.

(i did obtain a master's degree as a side-effect of an abortive attempt to obtain a phd at suny buffalo, but i never got a bachelor's degree or phd despite some years of trying.)

in moderate financial desperation, last year i wrote a sketch for a phd thesis and contacted david yetter at the math department at kansas state university about the possibility of enrolling as a grad student there to get a phd. yetter was very helpful to me but my negotiations with ksu hit a terminal snag due to bureaucratic requirements that i perform as a teaching assistant under excessively heavy-handed supervision.

(i'd be ok with not teaching at all, and i'd be even happier teaching independently, but as i have very strong ideas about the right way to teach i'd be very unhappy (and likely make others unhappy too) as an over-regulated teaching assistant).

yetter suggested to me that harvard might have more flexibility than ksu with regard to grad student teaching duties and length of residency needed to obtain a phd, and that your familiarity (to say the least) with some of my work might help my chances of getting admitted to your department as a grad student. that was enough to convince me to explore the possibility.

i'm writing to you to see whether you have any opinions/ideas/advice about how practical it might be for me to apply to the harvard math department as a grad student, or about whether there might be any particular more practical alternatives.

the thesis sketch that i wrote is here. it is intentionally very modest and unambitious, in contrast to most of my research which is insanely ambitious beyond my own ability to bring to fruition. i believe that, padded out with verbiage and proofs of the theorems, the sketch would be approximately sufficient for a phd, at least at most math departments.

also here is a brief dicussion of my recent mathematical activities and interests, including how the thesis sketch fits into the picture.