Michel Raynaud

He was born in Riom in the Department Puy de Dôme in France as a single son to a modest household. His father was a carpenter and his mother was cleaning houses.[2] He attended the local primary education at Châtel Guyon and Riom, and high school at the boarding school in Clermont-Ferrand.[2] He managed to enter the École normale supérieur where he studied from 1958 to 1962, while being first of the class in the "agrégation" exam where the new high school teachers were selected in 1961.[2] In 1962 he entered the French National Centre for Scientific Research where he studied together with his future wife Michèle Chaumartin. Both had the same doctoral advisor in Alexander Grothendieck. Raynaud graduated in 1967 and was hired as professor at the Orsay Faculty of Sciences in Paris where he was a employed until 2001, when he retired.[2] In 1983 he published a proof of the Manin–Mumford conjecture.[3]

In 1970 Raynaud was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice. In 1987 he received the Prize Ampère from the French Academy of Sciences. In 1995 he received the Cole Prize, together with David Harbater, for his solution of the Abhyankar conjecture.[2]

He practiced skiing (especially in Val-d'Isère), tennis, and rock climbing (in Fontainebleau).[1] He was married to the mathematician Michèle Raynaud (born Chaumartin)[2] who also worked with Alexander Grothendieck.

• Raynaud's isogeny theorem
• Raynaud surface

• Michel Raynaud at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Cole Prize citation for Michel Raynaud
• Illusie, Luc (January 2019). "Michel Raynaud (1938–2018)" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 66 (1): 37–41. doi:10.1090/noti1764.