André and Simone Weil are hardly household names in Britain today, but in the world of mathematics the former is acknowledged as a genius for his work on number theory; and to many philosophers, André’s sister, Simone, is both a genius and a saint.
André and Simone Weil are hardly household names in Britain today, but in the world of mathematics the former is acknowledged as a genius for his work on number theory; and to many philosophers, André’s sister, Simone, is both a genius and a saint. A precocious student who beat Simone de Beauvoir for the top place on entering the École Normale, Simone Weil was a socialist activist while working as a teacher in Le Puy and enrolled with the anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. She underwent a religious conversion while visiting Assisi in 1937 but never joined the Catholic Church. She died of malnutrition while working for the Free French in London in 1944, refusing to eat more than the basic ration for a worker in France.
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