Pierre Samuel

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Pierre Samuel (born September 12, 1921 in Paris , † August 23, 2009 in Paris) was a French mathematician who, among other things , dealt with algebraic geometry .

Samuel grew up in Paris and attended the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly school there . Samuel's father, Raymond Samuel, was a shop owner in Paris. In 1940 he was accepted at the École normal supérieure , where he studied in Grenoble. There he wrote a paper on the concept of multiplicity in geometry and published his first work in 1942, while still a student. During the Second World War, Samuel was a member of the French Resistance . After the war he received a scholarship and did his master’s degree at Princeton University , where he received his doctorate in 1947 under Oscar Zariski with the dissertation Ultrafilters and Compactification of Uniform Spaces . From 1947 to 1949 he worked in France for the CNRS . In 1949 he became Maître de conférences at the University of Clermont-Ferrand , where he later also became a professor. In 1961 he became a professor at the University of Paris-South XI in Orsay . In the early 1970s he was there, influenced by his friend Alexander Grothendieck , politically active in the environmental protection and peace group Les Amis de la Terre , of which he was chairman from 1982 to 1989. He also wrote books on ecology and global warming (1980). His fascination with Amazons (female warriors) led to the historical book Amazones, Guerrières et Gaillardes , published in 1975.

Samuel is known for his textbooks, especially the two-volume Commutative Algebra with Oscar Zariski, published in 1958 and 1960. But in 1953 he also wrote a brief Algèbre Locale , 1955 Méthodes d'algèbre abstraite en géométrie algébrique , Anneaux factoriels 1963, Old and new results on algebraic curves 1963 (including Grauert's proof of the Mordell conjecture for function bodies ) and Théorie algébrique des nombres 1967.

Samuel had been a member of Bourbaki since the late 1940s and also filmed some of their meetings. Excerpts were broadcast on French television in 2000. As Dieudonné's successor, he was the group's secretary ( Pierre Cartier was his own successor ).

In 1958 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh (Relations d'equivalence en geometrie algebrique).

Lucien Szpiro is one of his doctoral students .

He had been married since 1948 and had two children.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Hervé Kempf : Pierre Samuel (fr) . In: Le Monde , August 29, 2009. Retrieved January 25, 2012. 
  2. ^ A b John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson: Pierre Samuel ( en ) In: MacTutor . St. Andrews University. December 2010. Retrieved January 25, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Samuel, Pierre
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH August 23, 2009
Place of death Paris