by Rob Kirby
Andrew Pollard Ogg was born in Bowling Green, Ohio, on April 9, 1934. His father, Frank Chappell Ogg was a professor of mathematics at Bowling Green University.1 Andy’s mother, Florence Sutton Ogg, often taught math courses at Bowling Green University although she never completed her PhD in astronomy at the University of Illinois. She grew up on a poor farm in Illinois, but became a good piano player and entered a branch of the University of Illinois, having achieved the highest score on her entrance exam. She then went on to the main campus (Urbana–Champaign), again with a very high entrance exam score. There she met and married Frank and, after the birth of her first two children, abandoned her PhD work.
Andy was the fourth of five siblings: Frank (1930–1988) was first, then Virginia (1931–2020), Florence (1932), Andy, and Oscar (1940–2023). Frank Chappell Ogg, Jr. earned a math PhD at Johns Hopkins University with A. F. Wintner in 1955, and later taught at the University of Toledo.
All five siblings were expected to take piano lessons. Andy’s sisters complied, but his brothers resisted. Andy himself took six years of lessons, and then also took up the oboe and played in his high school’s Symphonic Band.
Andy finished high school in Bowling Green and then did his undergraduate work at Bowling Green University. He started graduate school at Harvard in 1956. As he quickly discovered, the academic level was high, and posed a challenge.
In my first year I discovered that juniors knew as much math as I did, so that took a little getting used to. […] The mathematical level at Harvard was way beyond what I’d known before.
Andy’s response to being underprepared was to sign up for a variety of courses, take careful notes, and then, at home, analyze in detail the theorems and proofs presented in class.
Reflecting back on his time at Harvard, Andy recognized how important John Tate — his eventual adviser — was in forming his sense of mathematical direction.
Tate was the major event in my mathematical life. I didn’t really know what I was going into, but in my second year Grothendieck spent either a semester or a year at Harvard and he gave a great course on the cohomology of groups. Without knowing it I was an algebraist, and I was in Tate’s orbit. I mean, it just happened. I never asked Tate to be my thesis adviser, and he never asked me to be his student. It’s just at a certain point we were spending time together; a thesis topic was agreed on; and everything just happened.
Tate did not give Andy a thesis problem, but did suggest an area that involved the cohomology of groups. Asked by Barry Mazur how he “launched” into number theory, Ogg stated, “Tate was giving courses on elliptic curves; that certainly made me an elliptic curver.”
I remember when Tate did this work on \( p \)-adic elliptic functions and people were getting after him for not publishing it. His answer was that it was unnecessary to publish it; you could simply turn to Courant and Hurwitz and read the section on elliptic functions and forget that it was over the complex numbers and read it over the \( p \)-adics; the formulas were over the integers, and if you read that you’ll know all you need to know. But of course that all got duly published later on…
At Harvard, Ogg also found a congenial cohort among Oscar Zariski’s students — algebraic geometers like Mike Artin, Heisuke Hironaka, and David Mumford. Artin was the son of Emil Artin, John Tate’s adviser, who had emigrated to the US from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Although they were close in age, Ogg formed a quasi student-teacher bond with the younger Artin: “I knew Artin well and was to some extent a student of his.”
George Mackey was also on the Harvard faculty at the time and was an intriguing presence to Ogg.
I and many other people became good friends with George Mackey, a very interesting person. He was an introvert who loved to talk and a great conversationalist. He would talk about anything and you didn’t have to agree with him — that was the important thing!
The friendship continued well beyond Ogg’s Harvard years, during Ogg’s frequent trips to Europe.
Later on George came to Berkeley quite a bit and he also spent a lot of time in Germany when I was spending a lot of time in Germany, so I actually saw quite a lot of him in the years after leaving Harvard. It was always a great joy to see him and hear his iconoclastic views. He also had views on all of mathematics. He said he gave up on homological algebra but wanted to know all the rest of math including logic.
After taking his degree in 1961, Andy went to Paris on a National Science Foundation Fellowship. He was ostensibly attached to the Poincaré Institute, but formal institutional life was different in Paris, and mathematics in particular was not confined to university corridors:
The mathematical life in Paris [was] around cafés and roving seminars.
Andy had taken both French and German in college, and became fluent in both languages during his several year-long sojourns in Paris and Bonn. In 1974, he lectured in the Séminaire Delange–Pisot–Poitou (Théorie des nombres) and wrote a paper2 in impeccable French. Not long after, he published a paper in German in Mathematische Annalen,3 with only one spelling mistake: “hilfsatz” instead of “hilfssatz” (lemma), which both he and Hirzebruch, as journal editor, had missed.
Over the course of his stays in Bonn, Ogg got to know Hirzebruch quite well. But he was not then fully aware of the extent of the latter’s role in rebuilding the European mathematical community in the post-war period:
[He was] an amazing character. Of course I knew before going to Bonn that he knew all the mathematicians in the US and in Western Europe, but what I didn’t realize was that he was extremely active in East German politics; he knew all the mathematicians there and traveled to East Germany frequently, so in a sense he was about as influential in East Germany as in the West.
With his experience of European life, Ogg was keenly attuned to the contrast in how academic life was conducted in different mathematical communities: in Paris, for example, it was quite natural for seminars or substantive exchanges to take place outside the university, whereas in the US, the department itself was the locus of activity. By the time Ogg took up his post as assistant professor at UC Berkeley in 1962,4 the math department there was a lively crossroads:
It was about twice as big a department as it is now, and there were visitors all the time, and there were really quite a lot of people coming through.
It was a stimulating environment, talent was rewarded, and Ogg quickly built friendships with other young faculty.
Yet there were changes afoot that made certain aspects of departmental life onerous: one was teaching large calculus classes. Such courses were challenging to teach and burdensome because of the sheer number of students. The problem worsened as the mathematical faculty began to shrink in size even as student enrollment at the Berkeley campus increased rapidly.
As time went on, the math department kept getting smaller and smaller, and the number of undergraduate students got much much larger. When I came in 1962, the undergraduate enrollment was actually being held at 27,000, and then it went up very fast. And then of course the proportion of people taking mathematics went up very fast, so the amount of calculus getting taught went way up. But not just the math majors — the engineers, everybody!
Ogg’s research was fruitful, and though his work often entailed heavy computation, he did this by hand, even after computers came into widespread use.
I liked to see the numbers go by. Tate told me that his mentor, Emil Artin, was a great computer, by hand of course since in his day there was no choice.
As a mentor, Ogg did not ascribe to any particular theory of advising, and gave this frank assessment of Tate, his own adviser at Harvard: “Disorganized!”. Looking back on his own PhD students, Ogg remembered that Cary Queen wrote a “very nice thesis”, which was partly overshadowed by work of Ribet and Deligne. Queen subsequently became a successful cancer researcher. Another strong student, Joseph Wetherell, joined “the spooks” in San Diego,5 where all his research is classified. Winnie Li, another former PhD student, is a Chern Prize winner (2010), a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Penn State University and a prominent researcher in number theory.
During a statewide budget crunch in the early 1990s, the University of California offered a lucrative early retirement program which a number of distinguished professors opted to take, Andy Ogg among them. He retired in 1994. It was the University’s loss!
