Suren Arakelov

Starting in 1965, Arakelov was a student of the Mathematics department of Moscow State University, where he graduated in 1971. The remarkable brilliance of his research career in this early stage was such that in 1974, he gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver, even though it was only that same year that he received his candidate of sciences degree from the Steklov Institute in Moscow, under the supervision of Igor Shafarevich. He then held the position of junior researcher at the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas in Moscow until 1979. During this period, however, he participated in public protests against the arrest of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which some claim played a role in his being labeled as mentally ill by the Soviet authorities. In any case, he was being described as schizophrenic by 1976-1977[1] and was then confined to a mental hospital starting in 1979. This led Arakelov to cease his research activity and to instead pursue modest and conventional life goals. As of 2014 he lives in Moscow with his wife and children.

Arakelov theory was exploited by Paul Vojta to give a new proof of the Mordell conjecture and by Gerd Faltings in his proof of Lang's generalization of the Mordell conjecture.

• S. J. Arakelov (1971). "Families of algebraic curves with fixed degeneracies". Mathematics of the USSR — Izvestiya. 5 (6): 1277–1302. doi:10.1070/IM1971v005n06ABEH001235.
• S. J. Arakelov (1974). "Intersection theory of divisors on an arithmetic surface". Mathematics of the USSR — Izvestiya. 8 (6): 1167–1180. doi:10.1070/IM1974v008n06ABEH002141.
• Arakelov, S. J. (1975). "Theory of intersections on an arithmetic surface". Proc. Internat. Congr. Mathematicians. Vancouver: Amer. Math. Soc. 1: 405–408.

• Serge Lang (1988). Introduction to Arakelov Theory. Springer. ISBN 0387967931.