Biography:Claude Chabauty

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Claude Chabauty (born May 4, 1910 in Oran, died June 2, 1990 in Dieulefit) was a French mathematician.

Career

He was admitted in 1929 to the École normale supérieure in Paris.[1] In 1938 he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on number theory and algebraic geometry. Subsequently he was a professor in Strasbourg.[2] From 1954 on, and for 22 years, he was the director of the department of pure mathematics at the University of Grenoble.[3]

Mathematical work

He worked on Diophantine approximation and geometry of numbers, where he used both classical and p-adic analytic methods.[3] He introduced the Chabauty topology to generalise Mahler's compactness theorem from Euclidean lattices to more general discrete subgroups.[4]

His 1938 doctoral thesis[5], developing ideas of Skolem,[6] is important in algebraic geometry. According to André Weil:

In his beautiful thesis, Chaubaty ..., following ideas of Skolem ..., has shown how the method of p-adic completion, with respect to a more or less arbitrary prime p, can yield deep results about varieties over an algebraic number-field; there, as already in Skolem's work, the problem concerns the intersection of an algebraic variety and of a multiplicative group; by p-adic completion, the latter becomes an algebroid variety defined by linear differential equations.[7]

Notes and References

  1. ↑ "L'annuaire - a-Ulm". https://www.archicubes.ens.fr/lannuaire#annuaire_chercher?identite=Chabauty. 
  2. ↑ "Claude Chabauty". http://www.numbertheory.org/obituaries/OTHERS/chabauty/chabauty2.html. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 special issue of Annales de l'Institut Fourier (vol. XXIX, Fasc. 1), March 1979, for Chabauty's retirement
  4. ↑ Chabauty, Claude (1950). "Limite d’ensembles et géométrie des nombres". Bulletin de la Société Mathématique de France 78: 143–151. http://www.numdam.org/item?id=BSMF_1950__78__143_0. 
  5. ↑ Chabauty, Claude (1938). "Sur les équations diophantiennes liées aux unités d'un corps de nombres algébriques fini". Annali di Matematica Pura ed Applicata 17 (1): 127-168. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF02410698.pdf. 
  6. ↑ Skolem, Th. (1935). "Einige Sätze über 𝔭-adische Potenzreihen mit Anwendung auf gewisse exponentielle Gleichungen". Mathematische Annalen 111 (1): 399–424. doi:10.1007/BF01472228. ISSN 0025-5831. 
  7. ↑ Weil, André (1950). "Number-theory and algebraic geometry". Proc. Intern. Math. Congress, Cambridge, Mass.. 2. pp. 90–100.  (quote from p. 94)