Michel Paul Lazard (5 December 1924 – 15 September 1987) was a French mathematician who worked on 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, led to the subject of chromatic homotopy theory. Lazard's self-contained treatise on one-dimensional formal groups also gave rise to the field of p-divisible groups. His major contributions were:
The classification of p-adic Lie groups: every p-adic Lie group is a closed subgroup of .
The classification of (1-dimensional commutative) formal groups.
The concept of "analyseurs", reinvented by J. Peter May under the name operads.
Awards and honours
In 1958 Lazard was the first recipient of the Prix Audin, named after the young French mathematician Maurice Audin, who had been assassinated in Algeria.[a][2][3] In 1972, he was awarded the Prix Poncelet by the Académie des Sciences for his work on algebra.[4]
Chevalley, Claude (2005). Classification des groupes algébriques semi-simples [The classification of semisimple algebraic groups, with the collaboration of P. Cartier, A. Grothendieck and M. Lazard]. Collected works (in French). Vol. 3. Springer-Verlag. ISBN3-540-23031-9. MR2124841. New edition of Séminaire C. Chevalley, 1956–1958: Classification des groupes de Lie algébriques, Secrétariat Math., 11 rue Pierre Curie, Paris, 1958.