Michel Lazard
Michel Paul Lazard was a French mathematician who worked in the theory of Lie groups in the context of p-adic analysis. His work took on a life of its own in the hands of Daniel Quillen in the late 20th century. Quillen's discovery, that a ring Lazard used to classify formal group laws was isomorphic to an important ring in topology, led to the subject of chromatic homotopy theory.
Lazard's self-contained treatise on one-dimensional formal groups also gave rise to the field of p-divisible groups.
His major contributions are:
