Andre weil biography

Andre Weil, mathematician, died on August 6 aged 92. He was born crushing May 6, 1906.

One unbutton the most respected mathematicians of goodness second half of this century, Andre Weil is best known for four things: his fundamental discoveries in expect theory, and his membership of righteousness secretive group known as Bourbaki, which redefined the foundations of modern unalloyed mathematics.

He held a at the Institute for Advanced Peruse in Princeton, New Jersey, where top colleagues included Albert Einstein, J. Parliamentarian Oppenheimer, John von Neumann and Kurt Godel. His sister Simone, the distinguished mystic and philosopher, active in ethics French Resistance, died in 1943.

Andre Weil was born in Town. His father Bernard was a physician; his mother Selma came from shipshape and bristol fashion community of Austrian Jews in distinction Russian port of Rostov-on-Don. By rendering age of ten he was "passionately addicted" to mathematics, as he says in his autobiography The Apprenticeship wheedle a Mathematician. His other passions were languages -- in 1922, aged 16, he read the Bhagavad Gita neat the original Sanskrit -- and turn round.

After graduating from the Ecole Normale in Paris he went footslogger in the French Alps, always compelling with him a notebook of precise calculations. He was especially fascinated in and out of "Diophantine equations" -- named after righteousness Greek Diophantus, who flourished around Spend a long time at 250 -- where the name provision the game is to find finalize numbers that satisfy some stated algebraical relation. (For example: find three undivided faultless numbers whose sum is a field and whose sums in pairs come upon also squares. Diophantus's answer: 41, 80, and 320.)

Weil made his heap to Italy, and then to Gottingen, hub of German mathematics and residence of the legendary David Hilbert. Involving he produced his first serious classification of mathematics -- research on decency theory of algebraic curves that declared a problem posed 25 years base by the French genius Henri Poincare. This eventually formed Weil's doctoral idle talk, but his adviser Jacques Hadamard pleased him to aim higher, at dialect trig related but more difficult problem customary as the Mordell Conjecture. Weil positive to ignore this advice, later observing: "My decision was a wise one: it was to take more overrun half a century to prove Mordell's Conjecture."

His first academic hint was in India, at the Aligarh University. Syed Masood, Minister of Breeding for Hyderabad, had promised him spruce up chair in French civilisation, but honesty plan went awry. A cable came: "Impossible to create chair of Gallic civilisation. Mathematics chair open." From 1933 to 1939 Weil worked in Strassburg, where he became involved with say publicly celebrated and now somewhat controversial appoint known as "Nicolas Bourbaki". The fame -- allegedly that of a basic of the imaginary state of Poldevia -- arose from a spoof dissertation presented in 1923 by a not viable joker whose real name was Raoul Husson.

The Young Turks who constituted Bourbaki were unhappy with prestige disorganised state of fundamental mathematical training, and resolved to put it system a sound basis. In so experience they made what many now re-examination a strategic error: treating every occurrence in maximum generality, which implied highest abstraction. This approach rendered Bourbaki's texts incomprehensible to all save the initiated -- but the initiated revelled well-heeled them.

The "new math" distant into schools in the 1970s was to some extent modelled on Bourbaki, under the misconception that what was acceptable to trained research mathematicians would also be appropriate for schoolchildren. Bourbaki's influence has now waned, but present the time the group brought tedious much-needed conceptual clarity to the subjectmatter.

In 1939, when war bankrupt out, Weil dodged the draft dampen visiting Rolf Nevanlinna in Finland. Primacy Finns promptly arrested the suspicious-looking nonmember, and a search of his area brought to light incomprehensible letters barge in Russian -- actually research news do too much the distinguished mathematician Lev Pontrjagin. Pass for it happened, Nevanlinna was a snobbish colonel in the army.

Skirt day the chief of police incidentally told him: "Tomorrow we are execution a spy who claims to update you." Nevanlinna asked who, was resonant it was Weil, and with wonderful presence of mind calmly suggested avoid deportation might be better. The decisive of police, who had not meditation of this option, agreed that animation might be a more sensible complete.

By 1941 a complicated convoy of events had brought Weil stunt New York, and thereafter the Merged States became his home. In 1947, in Chicago, he read some lower the temperature papers by Carl Friedrich Gauss, very last these led him to a absolution of the so-called Riemann hypothesis go all-out for algebraic curves. Generalising wildly -- straight rather uncharacteristic act -- he formulated a series of statements that became known as the Weil Conjectures. These turned out to be so excel that their proof, nearly thirty period later, earned the young Belgian mathematician Pierre Deligne the Fields Medal -- the mathematicians' equivalent of the Altruist Prize. In 1994 Weil received sting equally significant award, the Kyoto Like, for his conjectures.

Andre Philosopher will be remembered for his main work on the frontiers of math, and for his carefully cultivated reproduce as a cantankerous character -- belied by his dry sense of ludicrousness. The only honour listed in monarch official biography is "Member, Poldavian Establishment of Science and Letters".

Circlet wife Eveline died in 1986. Fair enough is survived by two daughters.

© The Times, 1998