Wei Yi was born in Paris. 1925 graduated from Paris Normal School, and then studied in Rome and G? ttingen. 1928 received his doctorate. 1933- 1939 taught in Strasbourg, during which I met Jiadang and established a profound friendship. He is a Jew and a rebel of conscience. After World War II broke out, he fled from France to Finland. His autobiography confirmed a famous anecdote: he was arrested on suspicion of espionage in Finland, and he was saved from being shot because of Rolf Nevanlinna's intervention.

Wei 194 1 moved to the United States, taught at the University of Chicago, and then settled in Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. Later, he was elected as a foreign academician of the American Academy of Sciences.

His achievements include several good conjectures (later proved by Bernard Dework, Alexander Grothendieck and Pierre Deligne) and Riemann conjecture in function domain. He also laid a good foundation for algebraic geometry, and found that Siegel and Schaller mentioned by Wei Yi had also introduced them into quantum mechanics before, which provided a good framework for understanding the classical theory of quadratic form.

Wei Yi knows many languages in Europe. He uses the Norwegian alphabet &; Oslash represents an empty set. He also has profound attainments in the history of mathematics, which can be seen from bourbaki's History of Mathematics. It was he who proposed publishing the history of mathematics in bourbaki.

Wei Yi won the wolf prize in mathematics in 1979, the Steele Prize the following year and the Kyoto Prize for Basic Science in 1994.