Lucien Szpiro

Lucien Szpiro (23 December 1941 – 18 April 2020) was a French mathematician known for his work in number theory, arithmetic geometry, and commutative algebra. He formulated Szpiro's conjecture and was a distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and an emeritus at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

Early life and education Lucien Szpiro was born on 23 December 1941 in Paris, France. Szpiro attended Paris-Sud University where he earned his Doctor of Philosophy under Pierre Samuel. His doctoral work was heavily influenced by the seminars of Maurice Auslander, Claude Chevalley, and Alexander Grothendieck. He also held visiting positions at several institutions including Columbia University and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Szpiro was the editor-in-chief of Astérisque from 1991 to 1993 and an editor of the Bulletin de la Société Mathématique de France from 1984 to 1990.

Szpiro advised 17 doctoral students, including Ahmed Abbes, Emmanuel Ullmo, and Shou-Wu Zhang. His conjecture inspired the abc conjecture, which was later shown to be equivalent to a modified form of Szpiro's conjecture in 1988. Szpiro's conjecture and its equivalent forms have been described as "the most important unsolved problem in Diophantine analysis" by Dorian Goldfeld, in part to its large number of consequences in number theory including Roth's theorem, the Mordell conjecture, the Fermat–Catalan conjecture, and Brocard's problem.

After moving to the CUNY Graduate Center in 1999, Szpiro began working on new research in arithmetic dynamics. He was a Member of the Academia Europaea.

Death Szpiro died on 18 April 2020 in Paris, France, from cardiac arrest.

Selected publications

Szpiro, Lucien. Conjecture de Mordell, Séminaire Nicolas Bourbaki 1983/4.