André Weil Life and Challenges presented By Cameron Holley 11 th Grade

1. André WeilLife and Challengespresented By Cameron Holley11th Grade

2. Andre Weil was born in Paris, France in 1908.He was born to Jewish parents. His mother Selma was of Austrian descent. And his father was a doctor. At a young age Andre thought mathematics was the most important thing. By the time André was sixteen he had read the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit. André had one sibling Simone Weil a famous Philosopher.

3. After studying at the École Normale in Paris. He traveled through the French Alps with a notepad creating new mathematical equations. During this time he was mostly interested in Diophantine equations. After his trip to the French Alps he went to Rome and then Göttingen this is where he produced his first piece of mathematical research on the theory of algebraic curves. He then undertook research for his doctorate in the University of Paris, supervised by Hadamard. He developed for his thesis the ideas on the theory of algebraic curves which he had begun to study at Göttingen. However, Hadamardwanted his brilliant student to aim higher and try to prove the MordellConjecture. Weil chose not to follow his supervisor's advice. He wrote later:- “My decision was a wise one: it was to take more than half a century to prove Mordell's Conjecture”.

4. After Weil is doctorate from Paris, He taught at different schools around the world. His first job was at the Aligarh Muslim University, in India for two years. After is time at Aligarh he worked at University of Strasbourg, France from 1933 to the start of the World War II. While he was there he became involved with a famous group of mathematicians, writing under the name Nicolas Bourbacki. In 1937 he married his wife Eveline

5. When World War II started Andre thought it was a disaster. Weil was conscientious objector and he wanted to avoid war. Andre Weil then fled to Finland to avoid fighting in the war. However escaping war in Europe wasn’t as easy at the time.

6. After hiding in Finland for some he was arrested. After police found mathematical theories written in Russian. He was charged for bring a spy. On the day Weil was supposed to be executed. His good friend Rolf Nevanlinna,persuaded them to just deport him. From Finland he was taken to a prison in France. Andre knew that he would’ve been killed if he stayed in jail. So he decided to join the army. But Weil had a plan, the sooner he could escape to the U.S he would.

7. When Weil finally got to America he started teaching at Haverford college in Pennsylvania in 1941.After four years at Haverford he went Swarthmore College. In 1945 he accepted aw position in Brazil at the Sao Paulo University. Where he stayed until 1947.When Weil came back to the U.S he was asked to join the Faculty at the University of Chicago. A position he kept in until 1958.In 1958 he worked at Institute of advanced study at Princeton University. Life in America

8. He kept his position at Princeton until 1976.From there he became a professor at Emeritus. While at Emeritus his research was mainly on number theory, algebraic geometry and group theory.

9. Andre Weil three dimensional algebraic geometry got him many recognitions. His work was compared to Yau work who won the a Fields Medal in 1982. One of Weil's major achievements was his proof of the Riemann hypothesis for the congruence zeta functions of algebraic function fields.

10. Weil's work on bringing together number theory and algebraic geometry was highly respected The foundations of many topics studied in depth today were laid by Weil in this work, such as the foundations of the theory of modular forms, automorphic functions and automorphic representations.

11. However, Weil's work was of major importance in a number of other new mathematical topics. He contributed substantially to topology, differential geometry and complex analytic geometry. It was not just to these areas that he contributed but, even more importantly, his work brought out fundamental relationships between the areas when he studied harmonic analysis on topological groups and characteristic classes. Also bringing these areas together was his work on the geometric theory of the theta function and Kähler geometry

12. Weil was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1950 at Harvard and again at the following International Congress in 1954. In 1979 Weil was awarded the Wolf Prize and, in the following year, the American Mathematical Society awarded him their Steele Prize. In 1994 he received the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation of Japan Later in Life

13. In 1979 Weil was awarded the Wolf Prize and, in the following year, the American Mathematical Society awarded him their Steele Prize. In 1994 he received the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation of Japan Honors

14. Andre Weil died in 1998 at the age 92 in Princeton New Jersey.

15. www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Weil.html www.ams.org/notices/199904/mem-weil.pdf www.math.sunysb.edu/~aknapp/BorelOnWeil.pdf www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=6385 Work Cited page