Frans Oort

Frans Oort, born on 17 July 1935, is a Dutch mathematician who works in algebraic geometry. He studied at Leiden University from 1952 to 1958, took his doctorate there in 1961 under Willem Titus van Est and Jaap Murre with a thesis on reducible and multiple algebraic curves, and had also studied with Jean-Pierre Serre in Paris and Aldo Andreotti in Pisa. After a first post at the University of Amsterdam, where he became a professor in 1967, he held a chair at Utrecht University from 1977 until his retirement in 2000, and was Eilenberg Professor at Columbia University in 2008. His research concerns abelian varieties and their moduli. In 1994 he formulated the conjecture now called the Andre-Oort conjecture, generalizing a conjecture of Yves Andre from 1989, and in 2000 he proved a conjecture made by Grothendieck in 1970. His doctoral students include Bas Edixhoven, Michiel Hazewinkel, Aise Johan de Jong, Hendrik Lenstra and Joseph Steenbrink, and he was elected to Academia Europaea in 2011.