Walter Baily, (1930-2013)

Digging in my old files I found an email of mine to Walter Baily in 2003 and his response. Then I realized that he has already passed away. I decided to write this tribute to his work on automorphic forms. In 2003 I was very obsessed with the formulation of a new theory of automorphic forms for the moduli of polarized Hodge structures proposed by P. Griffiths in 1970's. It was supposed to be a theory connecting mathematicians working in different areas  to each other, P. Griffiths,  in the algebro-geometric side,  A. Borel in the group theoretic side and R. Langlands in the arithmetic side. It did not work at all, and the main reason for this was that in general it was considering "Hodge structures" with no relation with algebraic geometry, and then it was asking for construction of certain automorphic forms which are responsible to relate them to algebraic geometry. A kind of contradictory project! This might have been the reason why P. Griffiths and R. Langlands despite being in the same institute never published an article together.
Years later I  formulated the theory in such a different way, that it became completely far from what P. Griffiths wanted. In a talk in ICTP in 2010, I presented the new reformulation and Griffiths was the chairman. I think he did not like it.  For this I wrote a book titled "Gauss-Manin connection in disguise: Calabi-Yau modular forms" which only consider a class of varieties for which Griffiths project fails.
Reading Baily's email after so many years what impressed me was his humble attitude toward a young post-doc like me who was still trying to figure out what he is supposed to do in Mathematics. This is also reflected in Steve Koppes' article "Walter Baily, influential mathematician, 1930-2013".  This is not so common among top mathematicians, as usually they get full mail boxes and prefer to respond those whom they know.  Even in the old times getting the attention of few top mathematicians was difficult.  For this I always remember how Gauss and Cauchy ignored the young Abel, who was trying to explain his ideas to them, and in the same time struggling with financial problems.
 I always tell my students to read the original articles, even if they are written fifty or hundred years ago. For sure if somebody wants to learn Baily-Borel compactification and   the corresponding techniques in automorphic forms, I would recommend nothing else than  the original article "Compactification of arithmetic quotients of bounded symmetric domains" published in 1966.