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Jacques Tits
Summary
Jacques Tits (tits) (12 August 1930 – 5 December 2021) was a Belgian-born French mathematician who worked on group theory and incidence geometry. He introduced Tits buildings, the Tits alternative, the Tits group, and the Tits metric.
Tits was born in Uccle to Léon Tits, a professor, and Lousia André. Jacques attended the Athénée of Uccle and the Free University of Brussels. His thesis advisor was Paul Libois, and Tits graduated with his doctorate in 1950 with the dissertation Généralisation des groupes projectifs basés sur la notion de transitivité. His academic career includes professorships at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) (1962–1964), the University of Bonn (1964–1974) and the Collège de France in Paris, until becoming emeritus in 2000. He changed his citizenship to French in 1974 in order to teach at the Collège de France, which at that point required French citizenship. Because Belgian nationality law did not allow dual nationality at the time, he renounced his Belgian citizenship. He has been a member of the French Academy of Sciences since 1979.
Tits was an "honorary" member of the Nicolas Bourbaki group; as such, he helped popularize H.S.M. Coxeter's work, introducing terms such as Coxeter number, Coxeter group, and Coxeter graph.
Tits received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1993, the Cantor Medal from the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung (German Mathematical Society) in 1996, and the German distinction "Pour le Mérite". 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 several Academies of Sciences.
He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988.
Tits died on 5 December 2021, at the age of 91 in the 13th arrondissement, Paris.
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