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Jean-Pierre Serre turns 100

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Born
15 September 1926
Summary
Jean-Pierre Serre is a French mathematician who has made important contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, and algebraic number theory. He was a member of Bourbaki.
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Biography

Jean-Pierre Serre's parents, Jean Serre and Adèle Diet, were both pharmacists. His mother Adèle had been a pharmacy student at the University of Montpellier and she took a calculus course (just for fun, she said, since she liked mathematics). In 1932 Jean-Pierre began his primary school education at the École de Vauvert. It was at the age of seven or eight that he began to enjoy doing mathematics. In 1937 he moved from the École de Vauvert to study at the Lycée Alphonse-Daudet in Nîmes. His mother had kept the calculus books that she had bought when she took the mathematics course at the University of Montpellier and Jean-Pierre began to learn mathematics from these books [9]:-

When I was 14 or 15, I used to look at these books, and study them. This is how I learned about derivatives, integrals, series and such (I did that in a purely formal manner - Euler's style so to speak: I did not like, and did not understand, epsilons and deltas.)
At this time mathematics wasn't the only subject he enjoyed. Although he never took much interest in physics, he enjoyed chemistry which was a topic that his parents, being pharmacists, knew a lot about. In particular his father had a lot of chemistry books which Jean-Pierre read when he was fifteen or sixteen years old. In fact he enjoyed one of these books so much that he kept a copy of it - this was the book "Les colloïdes", Gauthier-Villars, 1922 by Jacques Duclaux (1877-1978). However, as he went deeper into chemistry he became less enthusiastic about the subject and became more convinced that mathematics was the topic for him.

  1. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/biography/Shen-Kua
  2. 1995 Steele Prizes, Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 42 (11) (1995), 1288-1292. http://www.ams.org/notices/199511/steele.pdf
  3. R C Alperin, Review: Trees, by Jean-Pierre Serre, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 8 (2) (1983), 401-405.
  4. R Betti, A 'Nobel' for Jean-Pierre Serre: the Abel Prize (Italian), Lett. Mat. Pristem No. 47 (2003), 4.
  5. P Bayer, Jean-Pierre Serre, Fields Medal (Spanish), Gac. R. Soc. Mat. Esp. 4 (1) (2001), 211-247.
  6. A Chambert-Loir, Le prix Abel décerné à Jean-Pierre Serre, Gaz. Math. No. 99 (2004), 26-32.
  7. C T Chong and Y K Leong, An interview with Jean-Pierre Serre (Czech), Pokroky Mat. Fyz. Astronom. 33 (5) (1988), 241-248.
  8. C T Chong and Y K Leong, An interview with Jean-Pierre Serre, Math. Intelligencer 8 (4) (1986), 8-13.
  9. C T Chong and Y K Leong, An interview with Jean-Pierre Serre, Math. Medley 13 (1) (1985), 11-19.
  10. M Fried, Review: 'Topics in Galois Theory', by J-P Serre, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 30 (1) (1994), 124-135.
  11. R L Goodstein, Review: Cours D'Arithmétique, by Jean-Pierre Serre, The Mathematical Gazette 55 (393) (1971), 342.
  12. W H Gustafson, Review: Linear representations of finite groups, by Jean-Pierre Serre, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 84 (5) (1978), 939-943.
  13. S Huet, Boss des maths, Libération (28 May 2003).
  14. A Jackson, Serre receives Abel Prize, Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 50 (6) (2003), 693.
  15. H Jacquet, Review: A course of arithmetic, by Jean-Pierre Serre, American Scientist 62 (1) (1974), 120.
  16. M Kirch, J-P Serre: My first fifty years at the Collège de France, in Helge Holden and Ragni Piene, The Abel Prize: 2003-2007 The first five years (Springer Science and Business Media, 1009), 15-29.
  17. F Oort, Essay review of Jean-Pierre Serre's Oeuvres - collected papers, Nieuw Arch. Wisk. (4) 9 (1) (1991), 67-72.
  18. M Raussen and C Skau, Interview with Jean-Pierre Serre, Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 51 (2) (2004), 210-214.
  19. M Raynaud, Jean-Pierre Serre: une certaine éthique des mathématiques, Gaz. Math. No. 98 (2003), 41-43.
  20. K A Ribet, Review: Abelian l-adic representations and elliptic curves, by Jean-Pierre Serre, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 22 (1) (1990), 214-218.
  21. A Travesa, Jean-Pierre Serre, doctor honoris causa at the UB, SCM Not. (2006), Special issue, 38-39.
  22. A Travesa, Professor Jean-Pierre Serre, recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of Barcelona (Catalan), SCM Not. No. 21 (2005), 29.
  23. N Vila, Jean-Pierre Serre, first winner of the Abel Prize (Spanish), SCM Not. No. 19 (2003), 22-25.
  24. C T C Wall, Review: Lie Algebras and Lie Groups, by Jean-Pierre Serre, The Mathematical Gazette 51 (375) (1967), 76-77.

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Written by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson