DOCSLIB.ORG

A Brief Account on the Relationship Between SMF and VMS Lê Dung Tráng

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
A Brief Account on the Relationship Between SMF and VMS Lê Dung Tráng Asia Pacific Mathematics Newsletter A Brief Account On the Relationship between SMF and VMS Lê Dung Tráng he history of the link between the French Mathematical Society (SMF) and the Vietnam Mathematical Society (VMS) goes back to Tthe time Professor Lê Van Thiêm studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. It was during the Second World War. He passed his thesis in Göttingen a few days before it fell in the hands of the American Army. During many years the northern part of Vietnam L Schwartz, his wife, and Ta Quang Buu in North Vietnam, 1968 was isolated from the World. Laurent Schwartz, Professor at Ecole Polytechnique, In spite of the danger of the war a man stood at the a Fields medalist (considered to be a Nobel Prize in side of Professor Lê Van Thiêm to develop Mathematics. mathematics), founded the organisation “Comités Minister Ta Quang Buu studied in France before the France–Vietnam” in 1966 and, then, joined the Tribune Second World War. He told me that he was supposed of Bertrand Russell for crimes against humanity of to study at the Sorbonne, but in order to make things the American War in Vietnam. But, only in 1967 did difficult to the French masters he decided to pass a a mathematician, Alexander Grothendieck, also a free Licence, studying some mathematics, physics, Fields medalist, visit Vietnam for the first time. Laurent literature, English. By this way he understood the Schwartz visited Vietnam in 1968. However, it was more value of science and the meaning of mathematics. At as member of the Russell’s Tribune than as a mathemati- some point he was private secretary of President Ho cian. In 1969 Laurent Schwartz arranged that Nguyen Chi Minh, then vice-Minister of Defence. In 1954, he Dinh Tri, a professor in the Polytechnique school in signed the Geneva Peace Agreement after Dien Bien engineering of Hanoi, could visit Japan from Vietnam Phu. When I met him, he was Minister of Higher to attend a Mathematical meeting. Professor André Education. In the Vietnamese government he was Martineau, a former student of Laurent Schwartz, the one who immediately understood the potential of who unfortunately passed away in 1972, came in 1970. mathematics in Vietnam. Professor Bui Trong Lieu, a Vietnamese mathematician Minister Ta Quang Buu knew who Grothendieck living in France, visited Vietnam in 1970. He organ- was. In those days no politician in the World would ised my visit in 1972. So until then, nearly no one in know who a mathematician like Grothendieck would mathematics visited Vietnam. One of the main reason be. It is rather surprising that Ta Quang Buu knew of is that Vietnam was continuously at war between 1945 him and of his mathematics. He organised the travel of and 1975. Grothendieck, although the bombings were fierce and the universities had to hold their classes in the moun- tains north of Hanoi. A young female mathematician, Ms Hoang Xuân Sinh, answered a problem conjectured by Grothendieck during his course and a few years later passed her thesis under his supervision. Later in October 1974, Ta Quang Buu helped me organise a school with Bernard Malgrange, Alain Chenciner and Frédéric Pham. For the occasion he wrote a long article on the theory of Catastrophes in the Party newspaper Nhân Dân. He welcomed the visits of Yvette Amice Grothendieck (middle) and Hoang Tuy (far right) at the evacuated who was once President of the SMF, Jean-Louis Verdier, University of Hanoi 1967 another President of the SMF, Pierre Cartier, who later October 2012, Volume 2 No 4 33 Asia Pacific Mathematics Newsletter Anything which looks now obvious or easy was then extremely difficult. To arrange the timing between the visas, the arrival of the mathematicians, the reserving of a hotel room, the disponibility of an audience, the room for the lectures, the transportation, the sightseeing, all these were endless source of difficulties. I remember that it was hidden to Grothendieck that, after his visit (he lectured around 70 hours in three weeks in the mountains) the mathematics library lost more than a hundred books in a flood. First row, left to right: Hoang Tuy, Ta Quang Buu, Pham Van Dong on a visit to the Institute of Mathematics in 1978 Well, memories still flow in my head and I could endlessly speak about these earlier years. I have just visited Vietnam several times, Dacunha-Castelle, who chosen to tell them to-day so that younger generations introduced Probability and Statistics in Vietnam. In do not forget all the efforts that were put in developing relation with Japan he also organised the visit of Kyoji mathematics in Vietnam and remember the names of Saito who was in those days one of my best Japanese Lê Van Thiêm and Ta Quang Buu. friend. To end my talk, let me give you a vivid memory that Nowadays all this seems an easy achievement. I have of this early times. Young people have to understand that until the end of It was during my first visit in 1972. In those the 80’s, Vietnam was one of the poorest countries in days Tran Quynh was the Head of the Science State the World. When I came in 1972, there were less than Committee. He was not really a scientist, but he was 30 mathematicians in Mathematics in North Vietnam. a practical man and wanted good reasons to develop The most distinguished then were Professor Lê Van these relations with the outside World. I had a private Thiêm, Professor Hoang Tuy and Professor Phan Dinh meeting with him for half an hour. Then he asked me Diêu. The mathematical institute was a small room in abruptly: “Tráng, what do you want to do in Vietnam?” the State Science Committee in Hanoi. The seminars I did not know what to answer, because I did not happened in one of the universities of Hanoi. Obtaining think of any diplomatic answer, as I should have a visa was a continuous battle with the authorities. done politely. I had to show that I did not hesitate. I Arriving to Hanoi by plane or by train was difficult. I do remembered that my whole brain was concentrating not remember if Malgrange, Chenciner or Pham went to give a proper answer. Then, I answered: “I wish that through Bangkok or Vientiane. I personally came by Vietnam in 25 years can have someone receiving the train in 1972 through Siberia and China. The following Fields Medal, the award that mathematicians consider years I travelled by propeller plane through Moscow or as their Nobel Prize.” I am very sorry I made a mistake Berlin. It was taking 37 hours. of 13 years. Lê Dung Tráng Aix-Marseilles University, France Lê Dung Tráng is presently Emeritus Professor at University of Provence in Marseille, France. He holds the position of editor for the International Journal of Mathematics and Acta Mathematica Vietnamica. Professor Lê is an elected fellow of the Academy of Sciences for Developing Countries (TWAS) since 1993. Professor Lê, former Head of the Mathematics section at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy, was the Directeur de Recherches of the French National Research Council (CNRS) from 1994 to 1999; Professor at the University of Paris 7 from 1975 to 1999; Maître de Conférences at Ecole Polytechnique; visiting Professor at Northeastern University, Boston, USA; Research fellow at Harvard University; and a visiting Professor at Kyoto University, Japan. Professor Lê was also the Mathematics editor of the ‘Hermann Editions’ in Paris until 2005 and the Editor of the Journal of Algebraic Geometry until 1993. He received the d’Aumale Prize from the French Academy in 1990. He authored more than 100 research papers, edited three conference proceedings and published four lecture notes. 34 October 2012, Volume 2 No 4.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Distributions:The Evolutionof a Mathematicaltheory
    Historia Mathematics 10 (1983) 149-183 DISTRIBUTIONS:THE EVOLUTIONOF A MATHEMATICALTHEORY BY JOHN SYNOWIEC INDIANA UNIVERSITY NORTHWEST, GARY, INDIANA 46408 SUMMARIES The theory of distributions, or generalized func- tions, evolved from various concepts of generalized solutions of partial differential equations and gener- alized differentiation. Some of the principal steps in this evolution are described in this paper. La thgorie des distributions, ou des fonctions g&&alis~es, s'est d&eloppeg 2 partir de divers con- cepts de solutions g&&alis6es d'gquations aux d&i- &es partielles et de diffgrentiation g&&alis6e. Quelques-unes des principales &apes de cette &olution sont d&rites dans cet article. Die Theorie der Distributionen oder verallgemein- erten Funktionen entwickelte sich aus verschiedenen Begriffen von verallgemeinerten Lasungen der partiellen Differentialgleichungen und der verallgemeinerten Ableitungen. In diesem Artikel werden einige der wesentlichen Schritte dieser Entwicklung beschrieben. 1. INTRODUCTION The founder of the theory of distributions is rightly con- sidered to be Laurent Schwartz. Not only did he write the first systematic paper on the subject [Schwartz 19451, which, along with another paper [1947-19481, already contained most of the basic ideas, but he also wrote expository papers on distributions for electrical engineers [19481. Furthermore, he lectured effec- tively on his work, for example, at the Canadian Mathematical Congress [1949]. He showed how to apply distributions to partial differential equations [19SObl and wrote the first general trea- tise on the subject [19SOa, 19511. Recognition of his contri- butions came in 1950 when he was awarded the Fields' Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians, and in his accep- tance address to the congress Schwartz took the opportunity to announce his celebrated "kernel theorem" [195Oc].
    [Show full text]
  • Laurent Schwartz (1915–2002), Volume 50, Number 9
    Laurent Schwartz (1915–2002) François Treves, Gilles Pisier, and Marc Yor classics scholar and that of a mathematician. He had won the Concours Général in Latin; the Con- Biographical cours Général was and still is the most prestigious nationwide competition in France for high school- Sketch ers. Meanwhile he had become fascinated by the beauty of geometry, and, in the end, with the en- François Treves couragement of one of his professors in classics and of his uncle, the pediatrician Robert Debré, and Laurent Schwartz died in Paris on the 4th of July despite the rather unhelpful attitude of Hadamard, 2002. He was born in Paris on March 5, 1915. His dismayed that the sixteen-year-old Laurent was father, Anselme Schwartz, had been born in 1872 not acquainted with the Riemann zeta function, he in a small Alsatian town soon after the annexation of Alsatia by Germany. A fervent patriot, Anselme tried for admission to the science classes of the Schwartz had emigrated to France at the age of four- École Normale Supérieure (ENS), the most selective teen (before speaking French). In Paris he man- and most scholarly oriented of the “Grandes aged to carry out successful studies in medicine and Écoles”. He underwent the rather grueling two-year was to become a prominent surgeon in France in training (“hypotaupe”, followed by “taupe”, the the years between the two world wars. In 1907, tunnelling “submole” and “mole” years, so to speak) having just become the first Jewish surgeon ever preparatory to entrance to the ENS, where he was officially employed in a Paris hospital, Anselme admitted in 1934.
    [Show full text]
  • Combinatorics of Square-Tiled Surfaces and Geometry of Moduli Spaces
    COMBINATORICS OF SQUARE-TILED SURFACES AND GEOMETRY OF MODULI SPACES VINCENT DELECROIX, QUENTIN GENDRON, AND CARLOS MATHEUS Abstract. This text corresponds to the lecture notes of a minicourse delivered from August 16 to 20, 2021 at the IMPA{ICTP online summer school \Aritm´etica,Grupos y An´alisis(AGRA) IV". In particular, we discuss the same topics from our minicourse, namely, the basic theory of origamis and its connections to the calculation of Masur{Veech volumes of moduli spaces of translation surfaces. Contents 1. Square-tiled surfaces, Veech groups and arithmetic Teichm¨ullercurves 2 1.1. Basic definitions and some examples 2 1.2. Action of SL(2; Z) and Veech groups 4 1.3. Arithmetic Teichm¨ullercurves 5 1.4. Exercises 5 2. Some properties of Veech groups 7 2.1. Characteristic origamis 7 2.2. Origamis with prescribed Veech groups 8 2.3. Non-congruence Veech groups within H(2) 8 2.4. Exercises 10 3. Translation surfaces, moduli spaces and Masur{Veech volumes 11 3.1. Translation surfaces and GL(2; R)-action 11 3.2. Strata of translation surfaces 11 3.3. Masur-Veech volume and enumeration of square-tiled surfaces 12 3.4. Reduced versus non-reduced origamis 12 3.5. The Masur-Veech volume of H(2) 13 3.6. Further readings 15 4. Enumeration of square-tiled surfaces via quasi-modular forms 17 4.1. Frobenius formula and the generating function of square-tiled surfaces 17 4.2. Bloch-Okounkov and Kerov-Olshanski theorems 17 4.3. Computations 17 5. Classification of SL(2; Z)-orbits of origamis 18 Date: August 17, 2021.
    [Show full text]
  • The Top Mathematics Award
    Fields told me and which I later verified in Sweden, namely, that Nobel hated the mathematician Mittag- Leffler and that mathematics would not be one of the do- mains in which the Nobel prizes would The Top Mathematics be available." Award Whatever the reason, Nobel had lit- tle esteem for mathematics. He was Florin Diacuy a practical man who ignored basic re- search. He never understood its impor- tance and long term consequences. But Fields did, and he meant to do his best John Charles Fields to promote it. Fields was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1863. At the age of 21, he graduated from the University of Toronto Fields Medal with a B.A. in mathematics. Three years later, he fin- ished his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University and was then There is no Nobel Prize for mathematics. Its top award, appointed professor at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, the Fields Medal, bears the name of a Canadian. where he taught from 1889 to 1892. But soon his dream In 1896, the Swedish inventor Al- of pursuing research faded away. North America was not fred Nobel died rich and famous. His ready to fund novel ideas in science. Then, an opportunity will provided for the establishment of to leave for Europe arose. a prize fund. Starting in 1901 the For the next 10 years, Fields studied in Paris and Berlin annual interest was awarded yearly with some of the best mathematicians of his time. Af- for the most important contributions ter feeling accomplished, he returned home|his country to physics, chemistry, physiology or needed him.
    [Show full text]
  • Presentation of the Austrian Mathematical Society - E-Mail: [email protected] La Rochelle University Lasie, Avenue Michel Crépeau B
    NEWSLETTER OF THE EUROPEAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY Features S E European A Problem for the 21st/22nd Century M M Mathematical Euler, Stirling and Wallis E S Society History Grothendieck: The Myth of a Break December 2019 Issue 114 Society ISSN 1027-488X The Austrian Mathematical Society Yerevan, venue of the EMS Executive Committee Meeting New books published by the Individual members of the EMS, member S societies or societies with a reciprocity agree- E European ment (such as the American, Australian and M M Mathematical Canadian Mathematical Societies) are entitled to a discount of 20% on any book purchases, if E S Society ordered directly at the EMS Publishing House. Todd Fisher (Brigham Young University, Provo, USA) and Boris Hasselblatt (Tufts University, Medford, USA) Hyperbolic Flows (Zürich Lectures in Advanced Mathematics) ISBN 978-3-03719-200-9. 2019. 737 pages. Softcover. 17 x 24 cm. 78.00 Euro The origins of dynamical systems trace back to flows and differential equations, and this is a modern text and reference on dynamical systems in which continuous-time dynamics is primary. It addresses needs unmet by modern books on dynamical systems, which largely focus on discrete time. Students have lacked a useful introduction to flows, and researchers have difficulty finding references to cite for core results in the theory of flows. Even when these are known substantial diligence and consulta- tion with experts is often needed to find them. This book presents the theory of flows from the topological, smooth, and measurable points of view. The first part introduces the general topological and ergodic theory of flows, and the second part presents the core theory of hyperbolic flows as well as a range of recent developments.
    [Show full text]
  • The Fields Medal Should Return to Its Roots
    COMMENT HEALTH Poor artificial lighting GENOMICS Sociology of AI Design robots to OBITUARY Ben Barres, glia puts people, plants and genetics research reveals self-certify as safe for neuroscientist and equality animals at risk p.274 baked-in bias p.278 autonomous work p.281 advocate, remembered p.282 ike Olympic medals and World Cup trophies, the best-known prizes in mathematics come around only every Lfour years. Already, maths departments around the world are buzzing with specula- tion: 2018 is a Fields Medal year. While looking forward to this year’s announcement, I’ve been looking backwards with an even keener interest. In long-over- looked archives, I’ve found details of turning points in the medal’s past that, in my view, KARL NICKEL/OBERWOLFACH PHOTO COLLECTION PHOTO KARL NICKEL/OBERWOLFACH hold lessons for those deliberating whom to recognize in August at the 2018 Inter- national Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and beyond. Since the late 1960s, the Fields Medal has been popularly compared to the Nobel prize, which has no category for mathematics1. In fact, the two are very different in their proce- dures, criteria, remuneration and much else. Notably, the Nobel is typically given to senior figures, often decades after the contribution being honoured. By contrast, Fields medal- lists are at an age at which, in most sciences, a promising career would just be taking off. This idea of giving a top prize to rising stars who — by brilliance, luck and circum- stance — happen to have made a major mark when relatively young is an accident of history.
    [Show full text]
  • Report on the Current State of the French Dmls Thierry Bouche
    Report on the current state of the French DMLs Thierry Bouche To cite this version: Thierry Bouche. Report on the current state of the French DMLs. DML 2009 – Towards a Digital Mathematics Library, Jul 2009, Grand Bend, Ontario, Canada. pp.61-70. hal-00391860 HAL Id: hal-00391860 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00391860 Submitted on 5 Jun 2009 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Report on the current state of the French DMLs Thierry Bouche Universit´ede Grenoble I & CNRS, Institut Fourier (UMR 5582) & Cellule Mathdoc (UMS 5638), BP 74, 38402 St-Martin-d’H`eres Cedex, France [email protected], URL: http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/∼bouche/ Abstract. This is a survey of the existing digital collections of French mathematical literature, run by non-profit organizations. This includes research monographs, serials, proceedings, Ph. D. theses, collected works, books and personal websites. 1 Introduction If we view the Digital Mathematics Library as the electronic counterpart to the traditional mathematics’ laboratory library, it should hold a similar set of shelves: research monographs; serials; proceedings of conferences and seminars; Ph.
    [Show full text]
  • Laurent Schwartz (1915-2002) Et Le Colloque D’Analyse Harmonique De Nancy, 15-22 Juin 1947
    LAURENT SCHWARTZ (1915-2002) ET LE COLLOQUE D'ANALYSE HARMONIQUE DE NANCY, 15-22 JUIN 1947. par Anne-Sandrine Paumier R´esum´e. | Juste apr`esla fin de la guerre, d`es1945, la Fondation Rockefeller va chercher `ajouer un r^oledans la reconstruction de la science en France. Son aide va ^etrevers´eeau C.N.R.S., sous la forme de deux bourses : l'une destin´ee`al'achat de mat´erielscientifique, et l'autre `al'organisation de colloques. Le premier colloque de math´ematiquesqui a lieu dans ce cadre est celui d'analyse harmonique de Nancy, en juin 1947. C'est lors de ce colloque que Schwartz va exposer pour la premi`ere fois ses distributions sph´eriques (aujourd'hui connues sous le nom de distributions temp´er´ees). Cet article montre comment le colloque participe `ala vie collective des math´ematiques,et examine en quoi ce colloque en particulier est important pour les math´ematiqueset la carri`erede Laurent Schwartz. Introduction Alors que l'on f^etele centenaire de la naissance de Laurent Schwartz (1915-2002)(1), revenons sur un ´ev´enement peu connu, qui a n´eanmoinsjou´eun r^oleimportant dans Mots clefs. | Laurent Schwartz, le colloque d'analyse harmonique de Nancy 15-22 juin 1947, distributions sph´eriques,internationalisation. Je remercie Caroline Ehrhardt pour ses relectures de mon texte, ainsi que pour ses pr´ecieuxconseils. Je remercie aussi Claudine Schwartz de m'avoir donn´el'autorisation de reproduire la photographie de Laurent Schwartz au tableau, ainsi qu'Olivier Azzola, archiviste de l'Ecole´ Polytechnique, de me l'avoir transmise en haute d´efinition.
    [Show full text]
  • C.S. Seshadri: Eminent Mathematician and Institution Builder
    C.S. Seshadri: Eminent Mathematician and Institution Builder The passing of Professor Conjeevaram Srirangachari Seshadri on 17 July 2020 deprives India of one of its leading mathematical lights, and TIFR of one of the architects of its acclaimed School of Mathematics. Seshadri joined TIFR as a Research Scholar in 1953 and rose to the position of a Senior Professor, before he moved to Chennai in 1984. In all, he spent 32 fruitful years at TIFR as an academic member. He served the institute again from 1993 to 1998 as a member of its Council of Management. Seshadri was born on 29 February 1932 in Kanchipuram, and had his early schooling in Chengalpattu, where his father had a flourishing practice as a lawyer. Seshadri then joined Loyola College in Chennai, from where he obtained his B.A.(Honours) degree in Mathematics in 1953. At Loyola, Seshadri had several influential teachers; one of them was Father Charles Racine, a student of Élie Cartan, who introduced Seshadri and his fellow student M.S. Narasimhan to modern developments in mathematics, and encouraged them to join TIFR. If Father Racine opened for Seshadri and Narasimhan a window into the thriving world of French mathematics, K. Chandrasekharan, the founder of the School of Mathematics, opened the floodgates. Soon after the young students joined the institute, they were met with wave after wave of eminent visiting European and American mathematicians — the most influential among them being the Fields medalist Laurent Schwartz. In 1957, after finishing his Ph.D. work, Seshadri left for Paris, where he met the leading mathematicians of France’s famed Bourbaki era, including Alexander Grothendieck.
    [Show full text]
  • Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster?
    A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Agarwal, Ruchir; Gaule, Patrick Working Paper Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster? IZA Discussion Papers, No. 11977 Provided in Cooperation with: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics Suggested Citation: Agarwal, Ruchir; Gaule, Patrick (2018) : Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster?, IZA Discussion Papers, No. 11977, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/193271 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences),
    [Show full text]
  • Who Is Alexander Grothendieck? Winfried Scharlau
    Who Is Alexander Grothendieck? Winfried Scharlau This article is a translation of the article “Wer ist Alexander Grothendieck?”, which originally appeared in German in the Annual Report 2006 of the Mathematics Research Institute in Oberwolfach, Germany (copyright © Math- ematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach 2007). The article is based on the Oberwolfach Lecture delivered by Winfried Scharlau in 2006. With the permission of the author and of the institute, the article was translated into English by D. Kotschick, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, with the assistance of Allyn Jackson, Notices deputy editor (translation copyright © D. Kotschick 2008). Scharlau is writing a three-volume biography, Wer ist Alexander Grothendieck?: Anarchie, Mathematik, Spiritual- ität. The first volume, which primarily treats the lives of Grothendieck’s parents, has appeared as a self-published book and is available on the Web at http://www.scharlau-online.de/ag_1.html. or a mathematician, it is not hard to give though an exhaustive and satisfactory answer is an answer to the question posed in the surely impossible. title of this lecture: Grothendieck is one of the most important mathematicians of the Grothendieck’s Parents second half of the twentieth century, to One can only understand the life of Grothendieck— F if one can understand it at all—if one knows whom we owe in particular a complete rebuilding of algebraic geometry. This systematic rebuilding about the life of his parents. I report briefly on the permitted the solution of deep number-theoretic life of his father. He was from a Jewish family, was (probably) problems, among them the final step in the proof called Alexander Schapiro, and was born in 1890 of the Weil Conjectures by Deligne, the proof of in Novozybkov in the border area of Russia, White the Mordell Conjecture by Faltings, and the solu- Russia, and Ukraine.
    [Show full text]
  • Alexander Grothendieck: 1928-2014 a Stateless 20. Century Mathematical Giant
    Alexander Grothendieck: 1928-2014 A stateless 20. century Mathematical Giant Olav Arnfinn Laudal April 17, 2015 Olav Arnfinn Laudal () Alexander Grothendieck: 1928-2014 A stateless 20. century MathematicalApril 17, 2015 Giant 1 / 1 Introduction Grothendieck is considered as one of the most influential mathematicians in the 20. century. Although he traveled (and sometimes with obvious problems) with a Nansen-passport issued by the United Nations, he was a pure French scientific product. Reacting to his death, November 13. President Hollande hailed him as "one of our greatest mathematicians and an out-of-the ordinary personality in the philosophy of life". He was a son of a russian jewish revolutionary, Alexander Shapiro, that finished his days in Auschwitz, and a German mother, Hanka Grothendieck, with an amazing history of her own. Alexander Grothendieck came to Paris in 1939, to join his father and mother. They had left him with a lutheran pastor in Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power, and they had to flee. His mother died soon after the war, and Alexander had to take care of himself barely 16 years old. He studied at the Universities in Montpellier and Nancy, and came back to Paris in 1955, after having completed a Ph.D. thesis in Nancy that made his name well-known. Olav Arnfinn Laudal () Alexander Grothendieck: 1928-2014 A stateless 20. century MathematicalApril 17, 2015 Giant 2 / 1 I met him in the Fall 1957, and again in 60-62. As member of a little group of unofficial assistants, I had the fascinating opportunity to see him at work, having the job of typing and putting together the notes we took of his lectures.
    [Show full text]