Claude Chabauty

Claude Chabauty (1910 to 1990) was a French mathematician born in Oran who worked on Diophantine approximation and the geometry of numbers, using both classical and p-adic analytic methods. He entered the Ecole normale superieure in Paris in 1929 and took his doctorate in 1938 with a thesis on number theory and algebraic geometry, which developed ideas of Skolem and which Andre Weil praised for showing how p-adic completion can yield deep results about varieties over an algebraic number field. He introduced the Chabauty topology, which generalises Mahler's compactness theorem from Euclidean lattices to more general discrete subgroups. He was later a professor in Strasbourg and, from 1954 for twenty two years, directed the department of pure mathematics at the University of Grenoble.