André Weil did his career-making mathematics inside a military prison
In early 1940 the French mathematician André Weil sat in a military prison in Rouen, charged with failing to report for army duty. Between February and May he finished the work that made his reputation, a proof of the Riemann hypothesis for curves over finite fields.
Weil was born in Paris on 6 May 1906 into a comfortable, attentive family; his younger sister was the philosopher Simone Weil. He taught himself Sanskrit at 14, and Hindu thought and classical literature stayed lifelong passions. After a doctorate in 1928, with studies in Paris, Rome and Gottingen, he spent two academic years from 1930 at Aligarh Muslim University in India before teaching in Strasbourg.
The war years were chaotic. Travelling in Scandinavia when fighting broke out, he was arrested in Finland at the start of the Winter War on suspicion of spying, though tales of him nearly being shot were later shown to be exaggerated. Back in France he was jailed as a draft evader, tried on 3 May 1940 and sentenced to five years, then allowed to join a regiment instead. In January 1941 the family left Marseille by ship, bound for New York. He found undergraduate teaching at Lehigh University thankless and badly paid, moved on to Sao Paulo, then Chicago, and finally settled at the Institute for Advanced Study.
His great theme was the deep link between algebraic geometry and number theory. His doctoral work produced the Mordell-Weil theorem, and after the curves result he rebuilt the foundations of algebraic geometry to support it. The Weil conjectures, circulating from around 1950, guided a generation; Pierre Deligne completed the hardest part in 1973. Weil also introduced the adele ring, now basic to modern number theory.
He helped found Bourbaki, the collective that wrote mathematics under an invented name and reshaped its style. As the only member who knew the Norwegian alphabet, he picked its letter O with a slash as the symbol for the empty set. He shared the 1979 Wolf Prize with Jean Leray and died on 6 August 1998.
Source: André Weil
