Mathwar/Weil Andre
Andre Weil
Andre Weil (* May 6th 1906 in Paris, † August 6th 1998 in Princeton) He was a founding member and the de facto early leader of the influential Bourbaki group.
Life
The following anecdote is taken from his autobiography: after having been arrested under suspicion of espionage in Finland, when the USSR attacked on 30 November 1939, he was saved from being shot only by the intervention of Rolf Nevanlinna. This is the version that Nevanlinna propagated after the war. However, such a story is a bit too good to be true. In 1992, the Finnish mathematician Osmo Pekonen went to the archives to check the facts. Based on the documents, he established that Weil was not really going to be shot, even if he was under arrest, and that Nevanlinna probably didn't do - and didn't need to do - anything to save him. Pekonen published a paper on this with an afterword by André Weil himself. Nevanlinna's motivation for concocting such a story of himself as the rescuer of a famous Jewish mathematician probably was the fact that he had been a Nazi sympathizer during the war. The story also appears in Nevanlinna's autobiography, published in Finnish, but the dates don't match with real events at all. It is true, however, that Nevanlinna housed Weil in the summer of 1939 at his summer residence Korkee at Lohja in Finland - and offered Hitler's Mein Kampf as bedside reading. Weil signed 'Bourbaki' in Nevanlinna's guestbook.
Weil returned to France via Sweden and the United Kingdom, and was detained at Le Havre in January 1940. He was charged with failure to report for duty, and was imprisoned in Le Havre and then Rouen. It was in the military prison in Bonne-Nouvelle, a district of Rouen, from February to May, that he did the work that made his reputation. He was tried on May 3, 1940. Sentenced to five years, he asked to be sent to a military unit instead, and joined a regiment in Cherbourg. After the fall of France, he met up with his family in Marseille, where he arrived by sea. He then went to Clermont-Ferrand, where he managed to join Éveline, who had been in German-occupied France.
In January 1941, Weil and his family sailed from Marseille to New York. He spent the war in the United States, where he was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and Guggenheim Foundation.