1909-1984

Chevalley was born in Johannesberg, Transvaal, South Africa, in 1909, the son of Abel and Marguerite Chevalley—authors of the Oxford Concise French Dictionary. Chevalley had an unusual education in that he graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieuer in Paris, moved to Germany, then on to the United States to work at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He joined the faculty of the latter school, then moved on to Columbia University in New York, then back to the University of Paris, France. Chevalley worked in several mathematical areas: class field theory; algebraic geometry; and early studies of the theory of local rings. He won the Cole Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 1941 and was a life member of the London Mathematical Society.