Georges de Rham

Georges de Rham (born September 10, 1903 in Roche VD , Vaud , † October 9, 1990 in Lausanne ) was a Swiss mathematician .

De Rham went to the humanistic grammar school in Lausanne and studied biology, chemistry and physics at the University of Lausanne from 1921 , which he later gave up in favor of mathematics. In 1925 he obtained his licentiate in Lausanne and continued to study in Paris from 1926 , where he received his doctorate in 1931. He spent one semester at the University of Göttingen in 1930/31 .

In 1932 he became a private lecturer at the University of Lausanne . In 1936 he became an associate professor at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and at the same time at the University of Geneva . In 1943 he became a full professor at the University of Lausanne and in 1953 a full professor in Geneva. He retired in Lausanne in 1971 and in Geneva in 1973, but stayed at the university. In the course of his career he held a number of visiting professorships: in 1949/50 at Harvard and in 1950 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , then later (1957/58) a second time. He was at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay in 1966.

In 1931, in his dissertation, he succeeded in proving the homotopy invariance of the cohomology named after him, which was difficult at the time and which had already been suspected by Henri Poincaré and Élie Cartan . He later introduced the concept of currents ( French courants ) as an extension of Laurent Schwartz's concept of distributions to include manifolds.

1963 to 1966 he was President of the International Mathematical Union . He was a member of the Académie des sciences ( Institut de France ), the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and the Accademia dei Lincei .

De Rham received the Prize of the Marcel Benoist Foundation and the Prize of the City of Lausanne . He was an honorary doctor from the universities of Strasbourg, Grenoble, Lyon and the ETH Zurich .

Fonts

• Sur l'analysis situs des variétés à n dimensions, dissertation, Paris, 1931
• Variétés différentiables: formes, courants, formes harmoniques. Paris² 1955
• Differentiable manifolds: Forms, Currents, Harmonic Forms. Berlin, 1984. (Basic Math. Wiss .; 266) ISBN 3-540-13463-8
• [Collection:] Œuvres mathématiques. Genève: L'Enseignement mathématique, Université de Genève, 1981
• L'Argentine: description de vingt itinéraires d'escalade précédée de quelques considérations sur leurs difficultés et leurs dangers. Lausanne, 1944.

literature

• Max-Albert Knus: Rham, Georges de. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• [Festschrift:] Essays on Topology and Related Topics: Mémoires dédiées à Georges de Rham (editors André Haefliger and Raghavan Narasimhan ). Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1970 (with a contribution by Henri Cartan to his scientific work).
• Raoul Bott : Georges de Rham: 1901–1990 , Notices Amer. Math. Soc., Vol. 38, 1991, No. 2, pp. 114-115.
• Beno Eckmann Georges de Rham , Elements of Mathematics, Vol. 47, 1992, p. 118

Web links

• Literature by and about Georges de Rham in the catalog of the German National Library
• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Georges de Rham. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Memories 1925–1950 (French)