Armand Borel
| Armand Borel | |
|---|---|
Armand Borel in Bonn, 1967.
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| Born |
21 May 1923 La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland |
| Died | 11 August 2003 (aged 80) Princeton, New Jersey, United States |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Institute for Advanced Study |
| Alma mater | ETH Zürich |
| Notable awards | Leroy P. Steele Prize (1991) |
Armand Borel (21 May 1923 – 11 August 2003) was a Swiss mathematician, born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and was a permanent professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States from 1957 to 1993. He worked in algebraic topology, in the theory of Lie groups, and was one of the creators of the contemporary theory of linear algebraic groups.
He studied at the ETH Zürich, where he came under the influence of the topologist Heinz Hopf and Lie-group theorist Eduard Stiefel. He was in Paris from 1949: he applied the Leray spectral sequence to the topology of Lie groups and their classifying spaces, under the influence of Jean Leray and Henri Cartan.
He collaborated with Jacques Tits in fundamental work on algebraic groups, and with Harish-Chandra on their arithmetic subgroups. In an algebraic group G a Borel subgroup H is one minimal with respect to the property that the homogeneous space G/H is a projective variety. For example, if G is GLn then we can take H to be the subgroup of upper triangular matrices. In this case it turns out that H is a maximal solvable subgroup, and that the parabolic subgroups P between H and G have a combinatorial structure (in this case the homogeneous spaces G/P are the various flag manifolds). Both those aspects generalize, and play a central role in the theory.
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