Subject: [Fwd: Borel obit]
Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 11:24:48 -0400
From: jim stasheff <stasheff@email.unc.edu>
To: walter <wmichael@math.uno.edu>, dondavis <dmd1@lehigh.edu>

Peter Freyd wrote:
>
>                   Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
>                                The New York Times
>
>                 August 14, 2003, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
>
> NAME: Armand Borel
>
> SECTION: Section B; Page 8; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk
>
> LENGTH: 549 words
>
> HEADLINE: Armand Borel, 80, a Leader In 20th-Century Mathematics
>
> BYLINE: By PAUL LEWIS
>
> BODY:
>
>    Armand Borel, a Swiss-born mathematician who became a towering figure in the
> development of modern mathematics, died on Monday in Princeton, N.J. He was 80.
>
>    The cause was cancer, said his daughter Dominique Odette Susan Borel.
>
>     Dr. Borel, who was a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study
> in Princeton, N.J., was a highly influential figure in two groups of
> mathematicians that at different times and in different places had a profound
> influence on the evolution of mathematics after World War II.
>
>    In the years just after the war, Dr. Borel was close to a number of French
> mathematicians, including Jean Leray, Andre Weil, Henri Cartan and Jean-Pierre
> Serre, who self-deprecatingly referred to themselves as the Bourbaki Group,
> after a spectacularly unsuccessful French general in the Franco-Prussian War of
> 1870.
>
>    These mathematicians set themselves the lofty goal of reconceptualizing the
> whole of mathematics to give it a new degree of unity and abstraction in what
> Dr. Borel used to refer to, laughingly, as the second French Revolution.
>
>    Dr. Borel's contribution came through his lifelong study of certain
> continuous collections of mathematical symmetries, known as Lie groups after the
> Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie, and through his efforts to use what he had
> learned from this work to illuminate other fields of mathematical inquiry.
>
>    Because of the increasing importance the theory of Lie groups plays in modern
> mathematics, Dr. Borel's work became a major influence on some of the most
> important developments in contemporary mathematical research.
>
>    Dr. Borel became a leading figure in a second group of mathematicians, formed
> during the 1960's and 1970's at the institute, where he was a professor from
> 1957 to 1993. Besides Andre Weil, this group included the American Robert
> Langland and Pierre Deligne of Belgium.
>
>    Dr. Borel and the others, inspired in part by Dr. Langland, sought to use
> their insights into Lie group theory to understand profound patterns in the
> theory of numbers.
>
>    When Dr. Borel was awarded the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize
> in 1991 for his lifelong contribution to mathematics, the citation noted that he
> had "provided the empirical base for a great swath of modern mathematics, and
> his observations pointed out the structure and mechanisms that became central
> concerns of mathematical activity."
>
>    In 1973, Dr. Borel led a group of scholars at the institute in a highly
> publicized clash with its director, Dr. Carl Kaysen, over plans to appoint a
> sociologist, Robert N. Bellah, to a professorship there. The challengers
> questioned both his scholarly credentials and the need for a sociology
> department. In the end, Dr. Bellah did not join the institute.
>
>    Armand Borel was born on May 21, 1923, in the small French-speaking Swiss
> town of La Chaux-de-Fonds. He graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of
> Technology in Zurich in 1949 and received a doctorate from the University of
> Paris in 1952. In 1952 he married Gabrielle Aline Pittet.
>
>    A lover of music, Dr. Borel directed a concert program at the Institute for
> Advanced Study from 1985 to 1992.
>
>    He is survived by his wife; his daughter Dominique, of New York; and another
> daughter, Anne Christine Borel, also of New York.
>
> GRAPHIC: Photo: Dr. Armand Borel in 1998. (Photo by Cliff Moore)