Some remarks on his life and work I am sure that I must have met David Hayes for the first time at two summer conferences that were held at Bowdoin College in the mid 1960s. One was about algebraic number theory and the other about algebraic geometry, subjects of great interest to both of us. However, try as I might, I cannot recall a specific interaction during that distant period.I do remember quite vividly reading a paper of his entitled "Explicit class field theory for rational function fields" [10] which appeared in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in 1974. In this beautiful work, David exposits and carries forward some important work of his thesis advisor Leonard Carlitz. Carlitz wrote over 770 papers (which may be a record). The one which David wrote about had the uninformative title "A class of polynomials". In this paper Carlitz introduces a mathematical object which would later be renamed the Carlitz module. He showed that torsion points on the Carlitz module generate abelian extensions of F(T ), the rational function field over a finite field. These extensions are analogous to cyclotomic extensions of the rational numbers Q. In addition to giving an elegant exposition of Carlitz's theory, David added the very important theorem that if one adjoins all the torsion points the resulting field is "almost" the maximal abelian extension of F(T ). Moreover, he shows how to modify the construction to give the whole maximal abelian extension, thus creating a function field version of the famous Kronecker-Weber theorem. In the same year 1974, Vladimir Drinfeld published a paper (in Russian) entitled "Elliptic Modules". In future years elliptic modules were called, for obvious reasons, Drinfeld modules. As it turned out, the Carlitz module is a very special case of a Drinfeld module. 0022-314X/2012 Published by Elsevier Inc. http://dx.