Originally from New York City, Professor Thaddeus studied first at Harvard College, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and then at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and has taught at Columbia since 1998. His research specialty is algebraic geometry, especially those parts which are related to quantum field theory. Despite the technicality of his specialty, he is an advocate for generalism in education; he has broad interests and has even published an article on the piano concerto of Ferruccio Busoni, which is perhaps the longest concerto ever written. More recently, he has also become interested in academic politics and has sought to draw attention to the dramatic growth of university bureaucracies.