Claude Chevalley - Life

Life

Chevalley's father was a French diplomat who, jointly with his wife Marguerite, wrote The Concise Oxford French Dictionary. Chevalley graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1929, where he studied under Émile Picard. He then spent time at the University of Hamburg, studying under Emil Artin, and at the University of Marburg, studying under Helmut Hasse. In Germany, Chevalley discovered Japanese mathematics in the person of Shokichi Iyanaga. Chevalley was awarded a doctorate in 1933 from the University of Paris for a thesis on class field theory.

When World War II broke out, Chevalley was at Princeton University. After reporting to the French Embassy, he stayed in the USA, first at Princeton then (after 1947) at Columbia University. His American students included Leon Ehrenpreis and Gerhard Hochschild. During his time in the USA, Chevalley became an American citizen and wrote a substantial part of his lifetime output in English.

When Chevalley applied for a chair at the Sorbonne, the difficulties he encountered were the subject of a polemical piece by his friend and fellow Bourbakiste André Weil, titled "Science Française?" and published in the NRF. Chevalley was the "professeur B" of the piece, as confirmed in the endnote to the reprint in Weil's collected works, Oeuvres Scientifiques, tome II. Chevalley eventually did obtain a position in 1957 at the faculty of sciences of the University of Paris, and after 1970 at the Université de Paris VII.

Chevalley had artistic and political interests, and was a minor member of the French non-conformists of the 1930s. The following quote by the co-editor of Chevalley's collected works attests to these interests:

"Chevalley was a member of various avant-garde groups, both in politics and in the arts... Mathematics was the most important part of his life, but he did not draw any boundary between his mathematics and the rest of his life."