Jean-Pierre Serre

Jean-Pierre Serre is a French mathematician who has made important contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory, and who was a member of Bourbaki. He was born on 15 September 1926 at Bages in the Pyrénées Orientales. His parents, Jean Serre and Adèle Diet, were both pharmacists, and as a boy of fourteen or fifteen he learned derivatives, integrals and series from the calculus books his mother had kept from her university course. His work on spectral sequences, and on complex variable theory in terms of sheaves, earned him a Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1954, and the Serre spectral sequence became a standard tool for the homology of fiberings.