French mathematician known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry. He was a founding member and the de facto early leader of the mathematical Bourbaki group. He wrote in his autobiography that he was responsible for the null set symbol (Ø) and that it came from the Norwegian alphabet, which he alone among the Bourbaki group was familiar with. He wrote several books on the history of Number Theory.
André Weil was born to agnostic Alsatian Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by the German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. The philosopher Simone Weil was his sister and only sibling.
He studied in Paris, Rome and Göttingen and received his doctorate in 1928. While in Germany, Weil befriended Carl Ludwig Siegel. Starting in 1930, he spent two academic years at Aligarh Muslim University. Aside from mathematics, Weil held lifelong interests in classical Greek and Latin literature, in Hinduism and Sanskrit literature: he taught himself Sanskrit in 1920. After teaching for one year in Aix-Marseille University, he taught for six years in Strasbourg. He married Éveline Gillet on 30 October 1937.
In January 1941, Weil and his family sailed from Marseille to New York. He spent the remainder of the war in the United States, where he was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. For two years, he taught undergraduate mathematics at Lehigh University, where he was unappreciated, overworked and poorly paid. He then moved to Brazil and taught at the Universidade de São Paulo from 1945 to 1947, where he worked with Oscar Zariski. He then returned to the United States and taught at the University of Chicago from 1947 to 1958, before moving to the Institute for Advanced Study, where he would spend the remainder of his career. In 1979, Weil shared the second Wolf Prize in Mathematics with Jean Leray.
He died on 6 August 1998, aged 92, in Princeton, New Jersey.
Link to Wikipedia biography