Commutative Algebra at Florida State 1963–1968

We were both graduate students at Florida State in the middle 1960's. The research environment there at this time in commutative algebra was very stimulating. We would like to try to describe what we believe made this so. Robert Gilmer arrived in Tallahassee in time for the start of the 1963-1964 academic year. The Herstein-level course in those days was a year's course in linear algebra using the text by Hoffman and Kunze. Robert taught this course to an audience consisting of around twenty beginning graduate students and a couple of undergraduates. His goal was to finish the book and he succeeded. Robert had an immediate impact on the culture of the mathematics department. He organized Saturday morning touch football games for graduate students and junior faculty. As a consequence, the relationship between the students and the faculty was very cordial. This also enhanced Robert's appeal to those graduate students with an athletic background. Robert later said that he could learn something about the character of a student by seeing him play sports that he couldn't learn in a classroom.^ So successful was this that he subsequently organized Thursday evening volleyball games for the same group. In the fall of 1964 spring 1965, Robert taught the beginning graduate algebra course using the English translations of the two volumes of van der Waerden's Modern Algebra. Quoting from Saunders Mac Lane in the 1997 Notices of the AMS Volume 44, Number 3, page 322 "It is, in my view, the most influential text in algebra of the 20th century". Robert taught this in a standard lecture format, but the essence of the course was the homework. This consisted of ten problems per week assigned on one Monday and taken