Georges Poitou

Georges Poitou ( born February 11, 1926 in Paris, † 14 December 1989 ) was a French mathematician who worked on number theory.

Poitou came from modest circumstances. He attended on a scholarship, the Lycée Henri IV in Paris and studied from 1945 at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS ) and graduated there in 1948 with the Agrégation into mathematics. In 1953 he received his doctorate at Albert Chatelet with a thesis on number theory ( Sur l' approximation par les nombres of nombres complexes of the corps imaginaires quadratiques dénués d' idéaux non principaux particulièrement Lorsque vaut l' algorithme d' Euclide ). After that, he was Directeur de Recherche at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS ) and taught first as a lecturer ( Maître de Conferences ) at the University of Tunis and from 1955 to 1965 at the Faculté des Sciences de Lille. From 1965 he was at the Faculté des Sciences d' Orsay (now the University of Paris-Sud ) firm and served there from 1968 to 1970 as Dean ( Dean ).

With Hubert Delange (1913-2003) and Charles Pisot he headed founded by Delange and Pisot 1959 Seminar on Number Theory ( Séminaire Delange - Pisot -Poitou ), which met weekly on Tuesdays at the Institut Henri Poincaré and much for the establishment of number theoretic research in France reached.

It is for the exact sequence of Poitou- Tate known in the Galoiskohomologie and for the Tate -Poitou duality (or duality theorem of Poitou ).

From 1981 until his death in 1989 he was president of the École normale supérieure. Under his leadership ended segregation in education of female and male students by the ENS in the Rue d' Ulm and the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles 1985 merged. Poitou also caused a fundamental modernization of the educational offer of the ENS.