Eduard Čech

Eduard Čech

Eduard Čech (born June 29, 1893 in Stračov , Bohemia ; † March 15, 1960 in Prague ) was a Czech mathematician who dealt with projective differential geometry and set theoretical topology.

Life

Čech was the son of a police officer and studied at the Charles University in Prague from 1912 (interrupted 1915 to 1918 as a soldier in World War I) to become a teacher. Afterwards he was a mathematics teacher, but at the same time worked on his doctoral thesis on projective differential geometry and received his doctorate in 1920 under Karel Petr . From 1921 he was on a grant from the Ministry of Education in Turin with Guido Fubini , with whom he wrote a two-volume work on projective differential geometry (published 1926/27). From 1922 he was a private lecturer in Prague, but at the same time continued to teach as a school teacher. In 1923 he succeeded Mathias Lerch, who died early, as associate professor at Masaryk University in Brno and in 1928 professor. In 1935/36 he was in Princeton at the invitation of Solomon Lefschetz . Čech made Brno a center of combinatorial topology in the 1930s. He tried to keep the seminary going even during the Second World War, although the universities were closed by the occupiers. From 1945 he was at the University of Prague, became director of the Mathematical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and in 1952 President of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In 1956 he was director of the Mathematical Institute at the University of Prague.

In 1932 he introduced the Čech homology theory and at the 1932 International Mathematicians Congress in Zurich, the concept of higher homotopy groups , independently of Witold Hurewicz . In 1937 he introduced the Stone-Čech compactification of topological spaces.

In 1999 the asteroid (7739) Čech was named after him.

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Eduard Čech. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Minor Planet Circ. 34344