Armand Borel (1923–2003), Volume 51, Number 5
Armand Borel (1923–2003) James Arthur, Enrico Bombieri, Komaravolu Chandrasekharan, Friedrich Hirzebruch, Gopal Prasad, Jean-Pierre Serre, Tonny A. Springer, and Jacques Tits Citations within this article. Borel’s Collected Papers are [Œ], and his 17 books are referred to as [1] through [17]. These are all listed in a sidebar on page 501. An item like [Œ 23] is Borel paper number 23 in [Œ]. Ci- tations of work by people other than Borel are by letter combinations such as [Che], and the de- tails appear at the end of the article. their root systems. He spent the year 1949–50 in 1 Institute for Advanced Study, 1999. Paris, with a grant from the CNRS . A good choice Armand Borel (for us, as well as for him), Paris being the very spot where what Americans have called “French Topol- Jean-Pierre Serre ogy” was being created, with the courses from The Swiss mathematician Armand Borel died Leray at the Collège de France and the Cartan sem- August 11, 2003, in Princeton from a rapidly evolv- inar at the École Normale Supérieure. Borel was an ing cancer. Few foreign mathematicians had as active participant in the Cartan seminar while many connections with France. He was a student closely following Leray’s courses. He managed to of Leray, he took part in the Cartan seminar, and understand the famous “spectral sequence”, not an he published more than twenty papers in collabo- easy task, and he explained it to me so well that I ration with our colleagues Lichnerowicz and Tits, have not stopped using it since.
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