Jean-Pierre Serre is 100 years old today

Jean-Pierre Albert Achille Serre Quick Info Biography 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.) In high school I used to do problems for more advanced classes. I was then in a boarding house in Nimes, staying with children older than I was, and they used to bully me. So to pacify them, I used to do their mathematics homework. It was as good a training as any. ... very clear, and strict; he demanded that every formula and proof be written neatly. I had no idea one could make a living by being a mathematician. It was only later I discovered one could get paid for doing mathematics! What I thought at first was that I would become a high school teacher: this looked natural to me. Then, when I was 19, I took the competition to enter the École Normale Superieure, and I succeeded. Once I was at "l'École", it became clear that it was not a high school teacher I wanted to be, but a research mathematician. ... Cartan did not suggest research topics to his students: they had to find one themselves; after that he would help them. This is what happened to me. I found that Leray's theory (about fibre spaces and their spectral sequence) could be applied to many more situations than was thought possible and that such an extension could be used to compute homotopy groups. I was a young man, about 30, when I arrived at the Collège. 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. Teaching at the Collège is both a marvellous and a challenging privilege. 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. 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. A typical example for me was when I worked on the Riemann-Roch theorem (circa 1953), which I viewed as an "Euler-Poincaré" formula (I did not know then that Kodaira-Spencer had had the same idea.) 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. It is difficult to decide on a single work by a mathematician of Jean-Pierre Serre's stature which is most deserving of the Steele Prize. Any one of Serre's numerous other books might have served as the basis of this award. Each of his books is beautifully written, with a great deal of original material by the author, and everything smoothly polished. It would be hard to make any significant improvement on his expositions; many are the everyday standard references in their areas, both for working mathematicians and graduate students. Serre brings his whole mathematical personality to bear on the material of these books; they are alive with the breadth of real mathematics and are an example to all of how to write for effect, clarity, and impact. Presently, the topic which amuses me most is counting points on algebraic curves over finite fields. It is a kind of applied mathematics: you try to use any tool in algebraic geometry and number theory that you know of, ... and you don't quite succeed! As for the place of mathematics in relation to other sciences, mathematics can be seen as a big warehouse full of shelves. Mathematicians put things on the shelves and guarantee that they are true. They also explain how to use them and how to reconstruct them. Other sciences come and help themselves from the shelves, mathematicians are not concerned with what they do with what they have taken. this metaphor is rather coarse, but it reflects the situation well enough. (Of course one does not choose to do mathematics just for putting things on shelves; one does mathematics for the fun of it.) Here is a personal example. My wife, Josiane, was a specialist in quantum chemistry. She needed linear representations of certain symmetry groups. The books she was working with were not satisfactory; they were correct, but they used very clumsy notation. I wrote a text that suited her needs, and then published it in book form, as 'Linear Representations of Finite Groups'. I thus did my duty as a mathematician (and as a husband): putting things on shelves. ... of all kinds, from Giono to Böll to Kawabata, including fairy tales and the Harry Potter series. ... for playing a major role in giving a number of mathematical topics their modern form, notably topology, algebraic geometry and the theory of numbers. The events started in bright sunshine in Oslo on Sunday, 1 June 2003, with a simple ceremony at the Abel Monument in Slottsparken. After Jens Erik Fenstad, chair of the Abel Board (organizer of the prize events), had given a short speech, the Abel laureate, Jean-Pierre Serre, laid a wreath at the monument. On 2 June the scientific program started in Georg Sverdrup's house, the wonderful new library at the University of Oslo in Blindern. ... Serre's lecture was entitled "Prime numbers, equations and modular forms". He fully lived up to his reputation as a master expositor, lecturing in the old-fashioned way with chalk on the blackboard, and impressed everybody with a very clear presentation without notes. ... Later in the afternoon, Jean-Pierre Serre received several parties of journalists for interviews. On Tuesday morning Serre and representatives of the Abel Committee and the Abel Board met the world press: ten journalists from Norway, England, France, and Germany. On Tuesday afternoon the prize was presented at a ceremony, with due pomp and circumstance, at the University of Oslo. King Harald and Queen Sonja attended, and after some speeches the king presented the prize to Serre. References (show) Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/biography/Shen-Kua 1995 Steele Prizes, Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 42 (11) (1995), 1288-1292. http://www.ams.org/notices/199511/steele.pdf R C Alperin, Review: Trees, by Jean-Pierre Serre, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 8 (2) (1983), 401-405. R Betti, A 'Nobel' for Jean-Pierre Serre: the Abel Prize (Italian), Lett. Mat. Pristem No. 47 (2003), 4. P Bayer, Jean-Pierre Serre, Fields Medal (Spanish), Gac. R. Soc. Mat. Esp. 4 (1) (2001), 211-247. A Chambert-Loir, Le prix Abel décerné à Jean-Pierre Serre, Gaz. Math. No. 99 (2004), 26-32. C T Chong and Y K Leong, An interview with Jean-Pierre Serre (Czech), Pokroky Mat. Fyz. Astronom. 33 (5) (1988), 241-248. C T Chong and Y K Leong, An interview with Jean-Pierre Serre, Math. Intelligencer 8 (4) (1986), 8-13. C T Chong and Y K Leong, An interview with Jean-Pierre Serre, Math. Medley 13 (1) (1985), 11-19. M Fried, Review: 'Topics in Galois Theory', by J-P Serre, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 30 (1) (1994), 124-135. R L Goodstein, Review: Cours D'Arithmétique, by Jean-Pierre Serre, The Mathematical Gazette 55 (393) (1971), 342. W H Gustafson, Review: Linear representations of finite groups, by Jean-Pierre Serre, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 84 (5) (1978), 939-943. S Huet, Boss des maths, Libération (28 May 2003). A Jackson, Serre receives Abel Prize, Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 50 (6) (2003), 693. H Jacquet, Review: A course of arithmetic, by Jean-Pierre Serre, American Scientist 62 (1) (1974), 120. 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. F Oort, Essay review of Jean-Pierre Serre's Oeuvres - collected papers, Nieuw Arch. Wisk. (4) 9 (1) (1991), 67-72. M Raussen and C Skau, Interview with Jean-Pierre Serre, Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 51 (2) (2004), 210-214. M Raynaud, Jean-Pierre Serre: une certaine éthique des mathématiques, Gaz. Math. No. 98 (2003), 41-43. 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. A Travesa, Jean-Pierre Serre, doctor honoris causa at the UB, SCM Not. (2006), Special issue, 38-39. A Travesa, Professor Jean-Pierre Serre, recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of Barcelona (Catalan), SCM Not. No. 21 (2005), 29. N Vila, Jean-Pierre Serre, first winner of the Abel Prize (Spanish), SCM Not. No. 19 (2003), 22-25. C T C Wall, Review: Lie Algebras and Lie Groups, by Jean-Pierre Serre, The Mathematical Gazette 51 (375) (1967), 76-77. Additional Resources (show) Other pages about Jean-Pierre Serre: Reviews of Jean-Pierre Serre's books A Walk Around Paris Other websites about Jean-Pierre Serre: Encyclopaedia Britannica Norwegian Academy of Science (pdf file) Interview with Serre Collège de France Mathematical Genealogy Project MathSciNet Author profile zbMATH entry Honours (show) Honours awarded to Jean-Pierre Serre Fields Medal 1954 Speaker at International Congress 1962 BMC plenary speaker 1970, 1984, 1995 LMS Honorary Member 1973 Fellow of the Royal Society 1974 Balzan Prize in Mathematics 1985 AMS Steele Prize 1995 Wolf Prize 2000 Abel Prize 2003 Cross-references (show) History Topics: Bourbaki: the post-war years History Topics: Paris Latin Quarter Walk Societies: Belgian Centre for Mathematical Research Societies: Dutch Mathematical Society Societies: French Mathematical Society Other: 1954 ICM - Amsterdam Other: 1966 ICM - Moscow Other: 1970 ICM - Nice Other: 1982 ICM - Warsaw Other: 1st June