André Weil

André Weil was born in Paris to agnostic Alsatian Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by the German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71.

Simone Weil, who would later become a famous philosopher, was Weil's younger sister and only sibling.

André Weil (6 May 1906 – 6 August 1998) was a French mathematician, known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry.

He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century.

His influence is due

both to his original contributions to a remarkably broad

spectrum of mathematical theories, and to the mark

he left on mathematical practice and style, through

some of his own works as well as through the Bourbaki group, of which he was one of the principal

founders.

Aside from mathematics, Weil held lifelong interests in classical Greek and Latin literature, in Hinduism and Sanskrit literature: he had taught himself Sanskrit in 1920.

After teaching for one year at Aix-Marseille University, he taught for six years at University of Strasbourg.

He studied in Paris, Rome and Göttingen and received his doctorate in 1928.

While in Germany, Weil befriended Carl Ludwig Siegel.

This began in his doctoral work leading to the Mordell–Weil theorem (1928, and shortly applied in Siegel's theorem on integral points).

Mordell's theorem had an ad hoc proof; Weil began the separation of the infinite descent argument into two types of structural approach, by means of height functions for sizing rational points, and by means of Galois cohomology, which would not be categorized as such for another two decades.

Both aspects of Weil's work have steadily developed into substantial theories.

Starting in 1930, he spent two academic years at Aligarh Muslim University in India.

He married Éveline de Possel (née Éveline Gillet) in 1937.

Weil was in Finland when World War II broke out; he had been traveling in Scandinavia since April 1939.

His wife Éveline returned to France without him.

Weil was arrested in Finland at the outbreak of the Winter War on suspicion of spying; however, accounts of his life having been in danger were shown to be exaggerated.

Weil returned to France via Sweden and the United Kingdom, and was detained at Le Havre in January 1940.

He was charged with failure to report for duty, and was imprisoned in Le Havre and then Rouen.

It was in the military prison in Bonne-Nouvelle, a district of Rouen, from February to May, that Weil completed the work that made his reputation.

He was tried on 3 May 1940.

Sentenced to five years, he requested to be attached to a military unit instead, and was given the chance to join a regiment in Cherbourg.

After the fall of France in June 1940, he met up with his family in Marseille, where he arrived by sea.

He then went to Clermont-Ferrand, where he managed to join his wife Éveline, who had been living in German-occupied France.

Among his major accomplishments were the 1940s proof of the Riemann hypothesis for zeta-functions of curves over finite fields, and his subsequent laying of proper foundations for algebraic geometry to support that result (from 1942 to 1946, most intensively).

In January 1941, Weil and his family sailed from Marseille to New York.

He spent the remainder of the war in the United States, where he was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation.

For two years, he taught undergraduate mathematics at Lehigh University, where he was unappreciated, overworked and poorly paid, although he did not have to worry about being drafted, unlike his American students.

Weil and his wife had two daughters, Sylvie (born in 1942) and Nicolette (born in 1946).

He quit the job at Lehigh and moved to Brazil, where he taught at the Universidade de São Paulo from 1945 to 1947, working with Oscar Zariski.

He then returned to the United States and taught at the University of Chicago from 1947 to 1958, before moving to the Institute for Advanced Study, where he would spend the remainder of his career.

He was a Plenary Speaker at the ICM in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1954 in Amsterdam, and in 1978 in Helsinki.

Weil was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1966.

In 1979, he shared the second Wolf Prize in Mathematics with Jean Leray.

Weil made substantial contributions in a number of areas, the most important being his discovery of profound connections between algebraic geometry and number theory.