Quillen suggested to his student Kenneth Brown that it might be possible to create a theory of sheaves of spectra of which "K"-theory would provide an example. The sheaf of "K"-theory spectra would, to each open subset of a variety, associate the "K"-theory of that open subset. Brown developed such a theory for his thesis. Simultaneously, Gersten had the same idea. At a Seattle conference in autumn of 1972, they together discovered a spectral sequence converging from the sheaf cohomology of formula_3, the sheaf of "K""n"-groups on "X", to the "K"-group of the total space. This is now called the Brown–Gersten spectral sequence.