Short answers, pulled from the story.
George Cœdès (1886-1969) was a French scholar specializing in Southeast Asian archaeology and history. He is best known for his work deciphering Sanskrit and Old Khmer inscriptions from Cambodia, developing the concept of the Indianized kingdom, and rediscovering the maritime empire of Srivijaya.
The Khmer Zero is the inscription on stele K-127 from Cambodia, recognized as the first known use of zero in the modern number system. Cœdès' multi-decade work cataloguing Cambodian inscriptions, culminating in his eight-volume Inscriptions du Cambodge (1937-1966), brought this stele into the scholarly record.
Inscriptions du Cambodge is an eight-volume work published between 1937 and 1966 that contains editions and translations of over a thousand inscriptions from pre-Angkorian and Angkor-era monuments in Cambodia. It is considered Cœdès' magnum opus and remains the foundational reference for Old Khmer and Sanskrit epigraphy.
Srivijaya was a maritime empire centred on the modern Indonesian city of Palembang, with influence extending from Sumatra through the Malay Peninsula and into Java. Cœdès published Le Royaume de Çrīvijaya in 1918, the foundational argument that this kingdom had existed as a distinct historical entity, effectively restoring it to the map of history.
Cœdès became director of the National Library of Thailand in 1918 and in 1929 became director of L'École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), a position he held until 1946. He also served as an editor of the Journal of the Siam Society during the 1920s.
Historian Tatsuo Hoshino criticized Cœdès for underestimating the importance of northern Indochina, Yunnan, and the central Mekong Valley because his research concentrated on lower Southeast Asia. The critique points to a geographic limitation in an otherwise broad scholarly output.