An interview with Jean-Pierre Serre

Abstract

Jean-Pierre Serre will turn one hundred years old on 15 September 2026. On that occasion, a conference in his honour will be held at the Institut Henri Poincaré. When he suggests that I conduct what he calls “my first centenarian interview,” my thoughts turn to Bernard Pivot’s conversation with Marguerite Yourcenar at her home in Maine. “I had prepared that interview with the utmost care,” Pivot recalls, “because I knew there was a risk of not rising to the occasion. Some writers are indulgent towards journalists and willingly accept questions that are less than compelling, but I knew that Marguerite Yourcenar, although very kind and welcoming, was not one of them. I could not afford to let her down.”
The first part of the interview takes place on 19 April 2026, in Saint-Sulpice, where Serre now lives. Lac Léman is a three-minute walk away. On the train from Paris, I write each of my questions on a separate card. We talk without interruption for nearly five hours. He often gestures with his hands like a southerner. Towards the end of the interview, he chooses the next question at random by pointing to one of the cards.
I return to Saint-Sulpice the week of 6 July. I am there when he receives copies of the “fifth and last volume” of his collected works, containing most of his writings from 1998 to 2025. In the spirit of Bourbaki, we go through his answers together, reading them aloud line by line, pruning adverbs and adjectives, and “replacing false theorems with others.”