I’m very sorry to hear (via Michael Harris) of the death this morning in Paris of Lucien Szpiro, of heart failure. Szpiro was a faculty member here at Columbia for a few years, livening up the place at a time when the department was smaller and quieter than it is now. He then went on to a position at the CUNY Graduate Center and was often at the department here for number theory related talks. The Graduate Center has a short bio of him here, and on his website you can find more about his work, including some very nice short and lucid lecture notes on arithmetic geometry (see here and here). Some pictures of him and other mathematicians at his 70th birthday conference in 2012 can be found here.

What Szpiro is probably most famous for is the “Szpiro Conjecture” about elliptic curves which he first formulated in 1981. This is essentially equivalent to the later abc conjecture that has been the topic of recent controversy, so we really should have been all this time arguing about Szpiro, not abc. In a 2007 blog post I put out the news that Szpiro had announced a proof of abc at a talk he gave at Columbia (at Dorian Goldfeld’s 60th birthday conference). Alas, a flaw in that proof was quickly found.

Update: Something about Szpiro from Christian Peskine: