Jean-Pierre Albert Achille Serre Quick Info Bages, Pyrénées Orientales, France Biography Jean-Pierre Serre's parents, Jean Serre and Adèle Diet, were both pharmacists. His mother Adèle had been a pharmacy student at the University of Montpellier and she took a calculus course (just for fun, she said, since she liked mathematics). In 1932 Jean-Pierre began his primary school education at the École de Vauvert. It was at the age of seven or eight that he began to enjoy doing mathematics. In 1937 he moved from the École de Vauvert to study at the Lycée Alphonse-Daudet in Nîmes. His mother had kept the calculus books that she had bought when she took the mathematics course at the University of Montpellier and Jean-Pierre began to learn mathematics from these books [9]:- When I was 14 or 15, I used to look at these books, and study them. This is how I learned about derivatives, integrals, series and such (I did that in a purely formal manner - Euler's style so to speak: I did not like, and did not understand, epsilons and deltas.) He spoke about his time at the Lycée Alphonse-Daudet in Nîmes in [9]:- In high school I used to do problems for more advanced classes. I was then in a boarding house in Nimes, staying with children older than I was, and they used to bully me. So to pacify them, I used to do their mathematics homework. It was as good a training as any. ... very clear, and strict; he demanded that every formula and proof be written neatly. I had no idea one could make a living by being a mathematician. It was only later I discovered one could get paid for doing mathematics! What I thought at first was that I would become a high school teacher: this looked natural to me. Then, when I was 19, I took the competition to enter the École Normale Superieure, and I succeeded. Once I was at "l'École", it became clear that it was not a high school teacher I wanted to be, but a research mathematician. Serre married Josiane Heulot (1922-2004) on 10 August 1948; they had one...