Jean-Pierre Serre won the Fields Medal at 27 and still holds the record
In 1954 the French mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre received the Fields Medal at 27, the youngest winner then and still today. Almost half a century later, in 2003, he became the first person ever awarded the Abel Prize. In between, his ideas fed directly into the eventual proofs of two of mathematics' most famous problems.
Serre was born in 1926 in Bages, in the Pyrénées-Orientales, to parents who were both pharmacists. Educated at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he earned his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1951 and joined the Bourbaki group of mathematicians in the late 1940s. From 1956 until retiring in 1994 he was a professor at the Collège de France. Outside mathematics he skis, plays table tennis and goes rock climbing at Fontainebleau.
His early fame came from topology. Working in Henri Cartan's circle, his thesis developed what is now called the Leray–Serre spectral sequence, and with Cartan he found a way to compute homotopy groups of spheres, then one of the field's biggest open problems. At the Fields ceremony Hermann Weyl praised him and noted that the medal had gone for the first time to someone who was not an analyst. Serre afterwards shifted direction.
In the 1950s and 1960s he worked closely with Alexander Grothendieck, two years his junior, laying foundations for modern algebraic geometry. Serre's suggestion around 1958 about certain bundles helped inspire Grothendieck's étale cohomology, the machinery Pierre Deligne later used to prove the Weil conjectures. A question Serre posed in a 1955 paper, whether certain modules over polynomial rings are always free, kept algebraists busy until Daniel Quillen and Andrei Suslin independently answered yes in 1976.
From 1959 his attention moved to number theory and group theory. His conjecture on mod-p representations, now proved, tied Fermat's Last Theorem into mainstream arithmetic geometry, while another conjecture of his on Galois cohomology remains open. Later honours included the Wolf Prize in 2000 and France's Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. He even gave a public lecture on how to write mathematics badly.
Source: Jean-Pierre Serre
