Pierre Deligne

Pierre René, Viscount Deligne (born 3 October 1944) is a highly influential Belgian mathematician. He is known for work on the Weil conjectures, leading finally to a complete proof in 1973. He was born in Etterbeek, attended school at Athénée Adolphe Max and studied at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). After completing a doctorate under the supervision of Alexander Grothendieck, he worked with him at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) near Paris, initially on the generalization within scheme theory of Zariski's main theorem. In 1968, he also worked with Jean-Pierre Serre; their work led to important results on the l-adic representations attached to modular forms, and the conjectural functional equations of...