Armand Borel

Armand Borel (1923 to 2003) was a Swiss mathematician born in La Chaux-de-Fonds who held a permanent professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1957 to 1993. He studied at the ETH Zurich, where Heinz Hopf and Eduard Stiefel shaped his interests, then worked in Paris from 1949 under the influence of Jean Leray and Henri Cartan, applying the Leray spectral sequence to the topology of Lie groups and their classifying spaces. His work in algebraic topology, the theory of Lie groups and linear algebraic groups made him one of the creators of the contemporary theory of linear algebraic groups, and the Borel subgroup and Borel-Moore homology carry his name. He collaborated with Jacques Tits and Harish-Chandra, received the Brouwer Medal in 1978 and the Balzan Prize in 1992, and wrote a history of Lie groups.