Pierre Samuel

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

Samuel grew up in Paris, where he attended the Lycée Janson -de- Sailly. Samuel's father, Raymond Samuel, was a shopkeeper in Paris. In 1940 he was accepted at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied in Grenoble. There he wrote a thesis on the Multiplizitätsbegriff in geometry and published in 1942, while still a student, his first work. During the Second World War, Samuel was a member of the French Resistance. After the war, he received a scholarship and earned his master's degree at Princeton University, where he received his doctorate in 1947 with Oscar Zariski the dissertation ultrafilter and compactification of uniform spaces. 1947 to 1949 he worked in France, the CNRS. In 1949 he became Maître de conférences at the University of Clermont- Ferrand, where he also was professor later. In 1961 he became a professor at the University of Paris-Sud XI, Orsay. In the early 1970s he was there also, influenced by his friend Alexander Grothendieck, politically active in the environmental and peace group Les Amis de la Terre, which he chaired from 1982 to 1989. He also wrote books about ecology and global warming (1980). His fascination with the Amazons ( female warriors ) led to the historical book Amazones, guerrières et gaillardes appeared in 1975.

Samuel is known for his textbooks, in particular the two-volume Commutative algebra with Oscar Zariski, which appeared in 1958 and 1960. But he also wrote in 1953 a concise Algèbre locale, 1955 Méthode d' algèbre abstraite s géométrie algébrique, Anneaux factoriels 1963, Old and new results on algebraic curves 1963 algébrique (including with Grauerts proof of the Mordell conjecture for function fields ) and Théorie des nombres in 1967.

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

In 1958 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh ( equivalence relations d' en geometry algébrique ).

His doctoral counts Lucien Szpiro.

He was married in 1948 and had two children.