Lucien Szpiro

Lucien Szpiro, who lived from 23 December 1941 to 18 April 2020, was a French mathematician known for his work in number theory, arithmetic geometry and commutative algebra. Born in Paris, he earned his doctorate at Paris-Sud University under Pierre Samuel and his Doctorat d'Etat in 1971, worked at the CNRS for decades and in 1999 moved to the CUNY Graduate Center as a distinguished professor. In the 1970s he proved the Auslander zero divisor conjecture and, with Christian Peskine, developed the liaison theory of algebraic varieties. In 1981 he formulated Szpiro's conjecture relating the discriminant and conductor of an elliptic curve, which inspired the abc conjecture. He received the Prix Doistau-Blutel in 1987, became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012, and advised seventeen doctoral students.