Lucien Szpiro (23 December 1941 – 18 April 2020) was a French mathematician known for his work in number theory, arithmetic geometry, and commutative algebra.

[1][2] His doctoral work was heavily influenced by the seminars of Maurice Auslander, Claude Chevalley, and Alexander Grothendieck.

[6] Szpiro advised 17 doctoral students, including Ahmed Abbes, Emmanuel Ullmo, and Shou-Wu Zhang.

[7] The Institut des hautes études scientifiques described Szpiro as being "the first to realise the importance of a paper by Arakelov for questions of Diophantine geometry", which ultimately led to the development of Arakelov theory as a tool of modern Diophantine geometry exemplified by Gerd Faltings's proof of the Mordell conjecture.

[12][13][14][15] After moving to the CUNY Graduate Center in 1999, Szpiro began working on new research in algebraic dynamics.