André Weil

André Weil (May 6, 1906 - August 6, 1998) (pronounced [ɑ̃dʁe vɛj][1]) was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, renowned for the breadth and quality of his research output, its influence on future work, and the elegance of his exposition. He is especially known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry. He was a founding member and the de facto early leader of the influential Bourbaki group. The philosopher Simone Weil was his sister.
Contents[hide]
1 Life
2 Work
3 As expositor
4 Books
5 Quotations
6 See also
7 Notes
8 External links
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[edit] Life
Born in Paris to Alsatian Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany, Weil studied in Paris, Rome and Göttingen and received his doctorate in 1928. While in Germany, he befriended Carl Ludwig Siegel. He spent two academic years at Aligarh Muslim University from 1930. Sanskrit literature was a life-long interest. After one year in Marseille, he taught six years in Strasbourg. He married Eveline in 1937.
Weil was in Finland when World War II broke out; he had been traveling in Scandinavia since April 1939. Eveline returned to France without him. The following anecdote is taken from his autobiography: after having been arrested under suspicion of espionage in Finland, when the USSR attacked on 30 November 1939, he was saved from being shot only by the intervention of Rolf Nevanlinna. This is the version that Nevanlinna propagated after the war. However, such a story is a bit too good to be true. In 1992, the Finnish mathematician Osmo Pekonen went to the archives to check the facts. Based on the documents, he established that Weil was not really going to be shot, even if he was under arrest, and that Nevanlinna probably didn't do - and didn't need to do - anything to save him. Pekonen published a paper[2] on this with an afterword by André Weil himself. Nevanlinna's motivation for concocting such a story of himself as the rescuer of a famous Jewish mathematician probably was the fact that he had been a Nazi sympathizer during the war. The story also appears in Nevanlinna's autobiography, published in Finnish, but the dates don't match with real events at all. It is true, however, that Nevanlinna housed Weil in the summer of 1939 at his summer residence Korkee at Lohja in Finland - and offered Hitler's Mein Kampf as bedside reading. Weil signed 'Bourbaki' in Nevanlinna's guestbook.
Weil returned to France via Sweden and the United Kingdom, and was detained at Le Havre in January 1940. He was charged with failure to report for duty, and was imprisoned in Le Havre and then Rouen. It was in the military prison in Bonne-Nouvelle, a district of Rouen, from February to May, that he did the work that made his reputation. He was tried on May 3, 1940. Sentenced to five years, he asked to be sent to a military unit instead, and joined a regiment in Cherbourg. After the fall of France, he met up with his family in Marseille, where he arrived by sea. He then went to Clermont-Ferrand, where he managed to join Eveline, who had been in German-occupied France.
In January 1941, Weil and his family sailed from Marseille to New York. He spent the war in the United States, where he was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and Guggenheim Foundation. For two years, he unhappily taught undergraduate mathematics at Lehigh University. He taught at the Universidade de São Paulo, 1945-47, where he worked with Oscar Zariski. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1947 to 1958, before spending the remainder of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1979, he shared the second Wolf Prize in Mathematics.