Andre Weil

He died on August 6, 1998, at the age of 92, in Princeton, New Jersey.

He was born on May 6, 1906 in Paris, France, to Bernard Bernhard Weil, a medical doctor and his wife, Salomea Reinherz. He had a younger sister, Simone Adolphine Weil, who later became a famous philosopher.

By the age of 10, he developed a keen interest in mathematics. He was also passionate about traveling and studying different languages.

He was religious from an early age and by the age of 16, he had read the "Bhagavad Gita" in the original Sanskrit.

In 1925–26 he studied algebraic geometry of Italian mathematicians while in Rome.

He traveled to Germany for his fellowship at Göttingen, where he studied the number theory of German mathematicians.

For his first job as a professor, he traveled to India and taught mathematics at the Aligarh Muslim University, Uttar Pradesh, from 1930 to 1932.

After that, he returned to France and taught at the University of Marseille for a year. Then he was appointed at the University of Strasbourg, where he served from 1933 to 1940.

In 1939, he was mistakenly arrested for spying in Finland, when the Second World War broke out, while he was wandering in Scandinavia.

On his return to France in 1940, he was again arrested for failing to report on his duty in the French Army and was imprisoned in Le Havre and then Rouen.

During his stay in prison, he completed his most celebrated work in mathematics—he proved the Riemann hypothesis for curves over finite fields.

During the 1930s, he introduced the adele ring, a topological ring in algebraic number theory and topological algebra, which is built on the field of rational numbers.

One of his major accomplishments were the 1940s proof of the Riemann hypothesis for zeta-functions of curves over finite fields and his subsequent laying of proper foundations for algebraic geometry to support that result.

He also developed the Weil representation, an infinite-dimensional linear representation of theta functions which gave a contemporary framework for understanding the classical theory of quadratic forms.

His work on algebraic curves has influenced a wide variety of areas such as, elementary particle physics and string theory.