Who is jean pierre serre

Skip to content You currently have JavaScript disabled in your web browser, please enable JavaScript to view our website as intended. Fellows Directory Jean-Pierre Serre. Biography Jean-Pierre Serre is a Fields Medal-winning French mathematician who has made significant contributions in the fields of algebraic geometry, number theory and topology. Abel Prize For playing a key role in shaping the modern form of many parts of mathematics, including topology, algebraic geometry and number theory.

Fields Medal Achieved major results on the homotopy groups of spheres, especially in his use of the method of spectral sequences. Wolf Prize In the field of mathematics for his many fundamental contributions to topology, algebraic geometry, algebra, and number theory and for his inspirational lectures and writing. Returning to Paris, he again attended the Henri Cartan seminar which, in that year, was discussing functions of several complex variables and Stein manifolds.

The ideas he met in this seminar motivated the direction of his research. In Serre went to the University of Nancy where he worked until The inaugural lecture was almost like an oral examination in front of professors, family, mathematician colleagues, journalists etc. I tried to prepare it, but after a month I only managed to write half a page. When the day of the lecture came, it was quite a tense moment. I started by reading the half page I had prepared and then I improvised.

A few months later he was informed that inaugural lectures were published and he was asked to supply a transcript. As the lecture had been improvised he had no transcript but tried to recreate it by giving an impromptu lecture into a tape recorder and then giving the tape to a secretary to type up. However, the secretary said that the recording was inaudible. Serre then gave up and his inaugural lecture was never published.

Marvellous because of the freedom of choice of subjects and the high level of the audience: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique researchers, visiting foreign academics, colleagues from Paris and Orsay - many regulars who have been coming for 5 , 10 or even 20 years. It is challenging too: new lectures have to be given each year, either on one's own research which I prefer , or on the research of others. Since a series of lectures for a year's course is about 20 hours, that's quite a lot.

In particular he spent time at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in , , , , , , , , , , and at Harvard University in , , , , , , , , , , , , Serre's early work was on spectral sequences.

A spectral sequence is an algebraic construction like an exact sequence, but more difficult to describe. Serre did not invent spectral sequences, these were invented by the French mathematician Jean Leray.

However, in , Serre applied spectral sequences to the study of the relations between the homology groups of fibre, total space and base space in a fibration. This enabled him to discover fundamental connections between the homology groups and homotopy groups of a space and to prove important results on the homotopy groups of spheres. Serre's work led to topologists realising the importance of spectral sequences.

The Serre spectral sequence provided a tool to work effectively with the homology of fiberings. For this work on spectral sequences and his work developing complex variable theory in terms of sheaves, Serre was awarded a Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Serre's theorem led to rapid progress not only in homotopy theory but in algebraic topology and homological algebra in general. As an example of Serre's approach to attacking a problem, we quote from the interview [ 9 ].

Here Serre was answering a question about the importance of inspiration:- I don't know what "inspiration" really means. Theorems, and theories, come up in funny ways. Sometimes, you are just not satisfied with existing proofs, and you look for better ones, which can be applied in different situations. My first objective was to prove it for algebraic curves - a case which was known for about a century! But I wanted a proof in a special style; and when I managed to find it, I remember it did not take me more than a minute or two to go from there to the 2 -dimensional case which had just been done by Kodaira.

Six months later, the full result was established by Hirzebruch , and published in his well-known Habilitation thesis. Quite often, you don't really try to solve a specific question by a head-on attack. Rather you have some ideas in mind, which you feel should be useful, but you don't know exactly for what they are useful. So, you look around, and try to apply them. It's like having a bunch of keys, and trying them on several doors. Over many years Serre has published many highly influential texts covering a wide range of mathematics.

Many mathematicians in the whole world have been deeply influenced by him, through personal contacts, and the — often far-reaching — developments initiated by «questions of Sette» are innumerable. Furthermore, his talent as an expositor and the elegance of his style, universally considered as a model, are so exceptional that they, alone, can be viewed as a major contribution to contemporary mathematics. Home Prizewinners Jean-Pierre Serre. Jean-Pierre Serre.

Bio-bibliography Acceptance Speech — Berne,