Michel Lazard - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia

Name Michel Lazard Died December 23, 1985		Books Commutative Formal Groups

Michel Paul Lazard (5 December 1924 – 23 December 1985) was a French mathematician who worked in the theory of Lie groups in the context of p-adic analysis. His work took on a life of its own in the hands of Daniel Quillen in the late 20th century. Quillen's discovery, that a ring Lazard used to classify formal group laws was isomorphic to an important ring in topology, lead to the subject of chromatic homotopy theory.

Lazard's self-contained treatise on one-dimensional formal groups also birthed the field of p-divisible groups.

His major contributions:

classification of p-adic Lie groups: every p-adic Lie group is a closed subgroup of G L n ( Z p )

the classification of (1-dimensional commutative) formal groups

the universal formal group law coefficient ring (Lazard's universal ring) is a polynomial ring

the concept of analyseurs, reinvented by Peter May under the name "operads."

References

Michel Lazard Wikipedia

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