Émile Borel was born on January 7, 1871 in France. He taught at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and later at the Sorbonne. Following his academic career, Borel served in the French government in the Chamber of Deputies and later as Minister of the Navy. He was arrested and imprisoned briefly during the Vichy government of World War II. Borel was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1918, the Resistance Medal in 1945, and the Grand Croix Legion d'Honneur in 1950.
Émile Borel made fundamental contributions in set theory, measure theory, and functional analysis. He also contributed to the theory of divergent series and to game theory. In probability theory, Borel's name, along with Francesso Cantelli, is linked to the famous Borel-Cantelli lemmas that give conditions for the occurrence of infinitely many events to have probability 0 or 1.
Borel died on February 3, 1956 in Paris, France