Jacques Tits (1930 - 2021)#
Jacques Tits, Professor Emeritus from the Collège de France
in Paris and a distinguished member of the Mathematics section of Academia Europaea since 1988 passed away December 5, 2021 at the age of 91. Profesor Tits was one of founding members of Academia Europaea.
Prof. Philippe Michel, the Chair of the Mathematics section, says:
"Tits was a one of the giants of the theory of algebraic groups, in particular he developed the theory of buildings (now called Tits buildings) which are combinatorial objects that help to understand the structure of algebraic groups over local fields."
Among many honours, Prof. Tits received the Wolf Prize
in Mathematics in 1993 and the Cantor Medal from the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung (German Mathematical Society) in 1996. In 2008 he was awarded the Abel Prize, along with John Griggs Thompson, "for their profound achievements in algebra and in particular for shaping modern group theory".
He was a member of the French Academie des Sciences
, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
