EMS Magazine No. 141: celebrating Jean-Pierre Serre at 100
The September issue of the EMS Magazine marks Jean-Pierre Serre’s 100th birthday with an extensive interview by Javier Fresán, alongside articles on tsunami modelling, the history of mathematics, zbMATH Open, young mathematicians and more.
Happy 100th birthday to Jean-Pierre Serre!
To mark his centenary, the new EMS Magazine No. 141 features an extensive interview with Jean-Pierre Serre by Javier Fresán.
Jean-Pierre Serre is one of the most influential mathematicians of the past century, with foundational contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry and number theory. He received the Fields Medal in 1954 at the age of 27, and remains its youngest-ever recipient; in 2003, he became the first recipient of the Abel Prize. He was a professor at the Collège de France from 1956 until his retirement in 1994.
Asked whether getting older had diminished his taste for any areas of mathematics, Serre replied:
“I cannot think of any. It rather goes in the other direction. Getting older made me appreciate topics of which I was ignorant (or even did not like) when I was a beginner.”
The interview grew out of nearly five hours of conversation. Serre and Fresán later met again to go through the answers line by line, in the spirit of Bourbaki — pruning adverbs and adjectives and “replacing false theorems with others.”
The September issue is dedicated in part to celebrating Serre and his extraordinary contribution to mathematics.
The European Mathematical Society wishes Jean-Pierre Serre a very happy 100th birthday! 🎉
Other highlights include:
- From equations to coastal hazard assessment: mathematical modelling of tsunamis by Carlos Sánchez-Linares
- On Stefan Cohn-Vossen and his family by Bernd Kawohl and Michael Weigel
- The myths of scientific edition by Christophe Ritzenthaler
- Natural language search queries in zbMATH Open by Olaf Teschke
- Introducing IPYA: the Inverse Problems Young Academy by Giovanni Covi, Nataliia Kinash and Rommel Rabongue Real
- MATRIX – Residential research institute for the mathematical sciences in Australia by Luna Liu
- A spring gathering in Belgrade by Markus Juvonen
- Eighty years of the Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts by Marija Šegan-Radonjić and Đorđe Baralić
The EMS Magazine is published by EMS Press. Articles are published Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license and are indexed in zbMATH Open.
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