In Memory of Pierre Lelong

A Tribute to Pierre Lelong Born in Paris on March 14, 1912, Pierre Lelong died also in Paris on October 12, 2011. He was a brilliant student and he was admitted to Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1931. He attended the lectures of Professors Arnaud Denjoy and Paul Montel, who was his thesis advisor. He defended his Thèse d’Etat in 1941 about the singularities of holomorphic functions of two variables. In 1942, he introduced the class of plurisubharmonic functions which were developed independently by Kiyoshi Oka in Japan in the early 1940s. With these functions, he built a powerful tool in complex analysis in several variables which has been clearly important in the works of many mathematicians such as K. Kodaira, H. Grauert, L. Hörmander, E. Bombieri. Pierre Lelong taught at the Universities of Grenoble (1943–1945), Lille (1946–1954), and the University of Paris (Sorbonne and Paris 6) until 1981. From 1959 to 1961, he was a very effective advisor of the President of the French Republic Général Charles de Gaulle for scientific research and public education. Pierre Lelong was elected as a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1985.