Professor Olav Arnfinn Laudal Matematisk institutt Universitetet i Oslo
About Arnfinn Laudal
A short version of the Norwegian Biographical Lexica says: Olav Arnfinn Laudal, born 19. June 1936 in Sør-Varanger, Finnmark.
Arnfinn Laudal has been employed by the University of Oslo. He was central in the development of Norwegian mathematics from the 50’s and beyond, and has been the tutor of more than 50 master students and 20 PhD students.
Laudal was born and raised at Holmfoss in Pasvikdalen in Finnmark. His parents were teachers, and he grew up with five brothers in wartime, which marked him for the rest of his life.
Laudal started his upper secondary school (gymnasium) in Mandal in the southern part of Norway, he finished in 1954, and the same year he started his studies at the University of Oslo.
One year after his registration at University of Oslo, Laudal became an essential part of the seminar in modern analysis, and in 1957 he went to École Normale Supérieure to study there. In 1958 he finished his Cand. Real. in Mathematics at University of Oslo.
In the years 1959 – 1962 Laudal was a research fellow at Columbia University and Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris, before he returned to Oslo as Professor. A large part of Laudal's research has been within algebraic geometry, in particular deformation theory. Laudal retired formally in 2003, a formal fact none of his students noticed.
For the last 20 years, Laudal has had a big interest for Physics. He has published a series of articles and two books on the application of deformation theory to Physics, and is still working in the field. After he retired, he has been in charge of projects at Mittag-Leffler in Stockholm and ICTP in Trieste.
We should also mention that Laudal has been active politically, both at University of Oslo and in the National Politics. He is also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In particular, he has been involved in the anniversaries of Abel and Lie.
We give our congratulations to Arnfinn on his 80’th anniversary, and we hope to be able to work together with him for still a long time!
