Frans Oort

Frans Oort is a Dutch mathematician who specializes in algebraic geometry.

Career

Oort studied from 1952 to 1958 at Leiden University, where he graduated with a thesis on elliptic curves. He received his doctorate in 1961 in Leiden from and Jaap Murre with thesis Reducible and Multiple Algebraic Curves, but had previously studied under Jean-Pierre Serre in Paris and Aldo Andreotti in Pisa. Oort was from 1961 at the University of Amsterdam, where he became a professor in 1967. In 1977, until his retirement in 2000, he was a professor at Utrecht University.
He was a visiting scholar at several academic institutions, including Harvard University and Aarhus University. In 2008 he was the Eilenberg Professor at Columbia University.
His doctoral students include Bas Edixhoven, Michiel Hazewinkel, Aise Johan de Jong, Hendrik Lenstra and Joseph Steenbrink.

Oort's research deals with, among other topics, abelian varieties and their modules. In 1994, he formulated what is now known as the André–Oort conjecture. In 2000 Oort proved a conjecture made by Grothendieck in 1970.

In 1962, Oort made a short contribution Multiple algebraic curves at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm, but was not an invited speaker. In 2011 he was elected a member of Academia Europaea. In July 2013, he gave a talk at the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians in Taipei.

Oort married and later divorced author .

Commutative group schemes, Springer 1966;
as editor: Algebraic Geometry, Oslo 1970, Wolters-Noordhoff 1972
with Ke-Zheng Li: , Springer 1998
as editor with Steenbrink and van der Geer: Arithmetic algebraic geometry , Birkhäuser 1991;
as editor with Carel Faber and Gerard van der Geer: , Birkhäuser 2001
with Ching-Li Chai: