Biography

                I was born in 1946 in Kingston, Ontario, Canada and attended Kingston Collegiate and Vocational Institute.  In 1964 I began my undergraduate studies at M.I.T.  I spent my junior year (1966-67) in Paris where I took Math. Un from Laurent Schwartz.  I returned to M.I.T. and graduated in 1968.  I went to Berkeley in fall 1968 for graduate school.  It was a memorable experience, a time of great hope and unrest, of people's park and the Cambodian invasion.  I wrote my thesis in 1971  under Jim Simons who was visiting  Berkeley for a two week conference.  In it I computed the Chern-Simons invariants of quotients of spheres of dimension 4k-1.    I  graduated from Berkeley in 1973 and went to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.  After a year at the Institute I went to Yale as an assistant-professor from 1974 - 1978.  While I was at Yale I proved that all the standard arithmetic examples of hyperbolic n-manifolds admitted finite covers with nonzero first Betti number.  This I consider to be my best work.  During this period I received a Sloan fellowship which I used in fall 1978 at Oxford then in spring 1978 I went around the world visiting my friends along the way.  The summer of 1978 was momentous to me because I began two long collaborations.  I met my wife Gretchen at the Strawberry canyon pool and I began to work with Steve Kudla on the Weil representation and homology of arithmetic groups. I went to the University of Toronto in fall 1979 as associate professor, then to UCLA in 1980. Around this time I began work on the deformation theory of discrete subgroups of Lie groups and began a long collaboration with Bill Goldman. This subject has fascinated me ever since. In 1989 I moved to the University of Maryland and began working with Misha Kapovich.  I spoke at the Kyoto ICM in 1990 on deformation theory.
         I have been an avid golfer since my teens and have recently taken up fly-fishing and skiing.