Jean-Pierre Serre
(born September 15, 1926, Bages, France) is a French mathematician who was awarded the
Fields Medal
in 1954 for his work in
algebraic topology
. In 2003, he was awarded the first
Abel Prize
by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Serre
attended
the Ecole Normale Superieure (1945?48) and the Sorbonne (Ph.D.; 1951), both now part of the
Universities of Paris
. Between 1948 and 1954 he was at the National Centre for Scientific Research in
Paris
, and after two years at the University of Nancy he returned to Paris for a position at the
College de France
. He retired in 1994. Between 1983 and 1986 Serre served as vice president of the
International Mathematical Union
.
Britannica Quiz
Numbers and Mathematics
Serre was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam in 1954. Serre’s mathematical contributions leading up to the Fields Medal were largely in the field of algebraic topology, but his later work ranged widely?in
algebraic geometry
,
group theory
, and especially
number theory
. By seeing unifying ideas, he helped to unite
disparate
branches of
mathematics
. One of the more recent phenomena in which he was a principal contributor was the applications of algebraic geometry to number theory?applications now falling into a separate subclass called
arithmetic geometry. He was one of the second generation of members of
Nicolas Bourbaki
(publishing pseudonym for a group of mathematicians) and a source of inspiration for fellow medalists
Alexandre Grothendieck
and
Pierre Deligne
.
An elegant writer of mathematics, Serre published
Groupes algebriques et corps de classes
(1959;
Algebraic Groups and Class Fields
);
Corps locaux
(1962;
Local Fields
);
Lie Algebras and Lie Groups
(1965);
Abelian l-adic Representations and Elliptic Curves
(1968);
Cours d’arithmetique
(1970;
A Course in Arithmetic
);
Cohomologie Galoisienne
(1964;
Galois Cohomology
);
Representations lineaires des groupes finis
(1967;
Linear Representations of Finite Groups
);
Algebre locale, multiplicites
(1965; “Local Algebra: Multiplicities”);
Arbres, amalgames, SL
2
(1977;
Trees
); and, with Uwe Jannsen and Steven L. Kleiman,
Motives
(1994). His collected works were published in 1986. A Leroy P. Steele Prize in 1995 was awarded to Serre on the basis of
A Course in Arithmetic
.