This morning I was reading Kevin Drum's post on Ahmed Chalabi's biography and discovered that he got a math Ph.D. from the University of Chicago!

That's worse even than having the unibomber! (He was an undergrad at MIT, so now Harvard's off the hook for the unibomber.)

Turns out he has three papers (link requires subscription):

Pure submodules of injective modules.

The Jacobson radical of a group algebra under field extensions in characteristic $p$.

and Modules over group algebras and their application in undermining democracy in Iraq

errr... wait, that last one should be his Ph.D. thesis:
Modules over group algebras and their application in the study of semi-simplicity.

One of his big results was:
Suppose that $G$ is any group and $K$ is any field. $JKG$ denotes the Jacobson radical of $KG$. $KG$ is called semisimple if $JKG=(0)$. The following theorem is proved: Let $K$ have characteristic $p$ and let $Z_p$ be its prime subfield; then if $Z_PG$ is semisimple, so is $KG$.

I really shouldn't be quite so amused by all this, but nonetheless I am.

His advisor was the infamous George Glauberman (AJ's response to how my life would be different if I were at Chicago always includes him saying i'd probably be working for (said in a weird slow voice) g-e-o-r-g-e g-l-a-u-b-e-r-m-a-n and then maniacally laughing). The rest of his genealogy is Glauberman-Bruck-Brauer-Schur-Frobenius-Weierstrass-Gudermann-Gauss.

Damn! that's a fine geneology. Better than mine will be.

Maybe I should give up and go try to become a puppet leader of a 3rd world country instead.