Pierre Samuel

Pierre Samuel was a French mathematician, known for his work in commutative algebra and its applications to algebraic geometry. The two-volume work Commutative Algebra that he wrote with Oscar Zariski is a classic. Other books of his covered projective geometry and algebraic number theory. He ran a Paris seminar during the 1960s, and became Professeur émérite at the Université Paris-Sud (Orsay). His lectures on unique factorization domains published by Tata institute of fundamental research played a significant role in computing the Picard group of a Zariski surface via the work of Jeffrey Lang and collaborators.The method was inspired by earlier work of Nathan Jacobson and Pierre Cartier another outstanding member of the Bourbaki group.Nicholas Katz related this to the concept of p-curvature of a connection introduced by Alexander Grothedieck.

He was a member of the Bourbaki group, and filmed some of their meetings. A French television documentary on Bourbaki broadcast some of this footage in 2000.

Reference

• Colloque en l'honneur de Pierre Samuel, Mem. Math. Soc. Fr. (1989)