Michel Kervaire (1927–2007)

Abstract

This obituary of Michel Kervaire provides some biographical data, and describes his activity in organising spring seminars in Les Plans-sur-Bex. Some of his mathematical results are briefly discussed: his discovery of a topological manifold without any smooth structure, his results with Milnor on spheres with several smooth structures, his subject-founding paper on high-dimensional knots, the Kervaire conjecture on group presentations, and his results from the period 1987–2007 in algebra, combinatorics and number theory. A short last section discusses dramatic recent progress on the Kervaire invariant problem by Hill, Hopkins and Ravenel in 2009.