Louis de Branges de Bourcia

Who is Louis de Branges de Bourcia?

Louis de Branges de Bourcia is a French-American mathematician. He is the Edward C. Elliott Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He is best known for proving the long-standing Bieberbach conjecture in 1984, now called de Branges's theorem. He claims to have proved several important conjectures in mathematics, including the generalized Riemann hypothesis.

Born to American parents who lived in Paris, de Branges moved to the U.S. in 1941 with his mother and sisters. His native language is French. He did his undergraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and received a PhD in mathematics from Cornell University. His advisors were Wolfgang Fuchs and then-future Purdue colleague Harry Pollard. He spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study and another two at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He was appointed to Purdue in 1962.

An analyst, de Branges has made incursions into real, functional, complex, harmonic and Diophantine analyses. As far as particular techniques and approaches are concerned, he is an expert in spectral and operator theories.