Roger Godement

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Roger Godement (born October 1, 1921 in Le Havre ; † July 21, 2016 ) was a French mathematician who dealt with harmonic analysis and functional analysis , among other things . In France he is known for his textbooks.

Roger Godement 1984

Godement studied from 1940 at the École normal supérieure with Henri Cartan (dissertation Les fonctions de type positif et la théorie des groupes ). He taught at the University of Nancy from 1946 to 1955 and then at the Faculté des Sciences in Paris, later at the University of Paris VII Denis Diderot until 1990.

He achieved important results for harmonic analysis on locally compact Abelian groups . His work on the abstract theory of spherical functions (harmonic analysis on the sphere) and his concept of square-integrable representation influenced Harish-Chandra , among others , who decisively shaped the further development of the theory of infinite-dimensional representations of Lie groups . In the theory of arithmetic groups he suspected a compactness criterion named after him . Later he worked with his PhD student Hervé Jacquet on the zeta function of simple algebras.

Godement had been a member of the Bourbaki group of French mathematicians since the early 1950s and was active in the Séminaire Bourbaki and in the seminary of Henri Cartan. His 1958 book Topologie Algébrique et Théorie des Faisceaux became influential as an early textbook on sheaf theory .

In his analysis textbook, he explicitly emphasizes in the foreword not to write for French elite students, for example the École Polytechnique, who only use mathematics as a means to make a career in the French state or in companies. In the second volume there is an appendix in which he goes into detail about the history of the development of the military-industrial complex, especially in the USA, but also about Germany during World War II, France (especially in the French edition, in which the appendix of the English edition differs significantly), biological weapons, the history of computers in the context of the military, and the history of nuclear weapons and Star Wars technology of the 1980s.

His doctoral students include Christophe Soulé (1979) and Hervé Jacquet .

Fonts

  • Analysis mathématique. 4 volumes, Springer-Verlag 1998–2001. English edition: Analysis 1–4, Springer
  • Cours d'algèbre. Hermann 1963, 1966.
  • Algebra. Hermann 1968.
  • Topology algébrique et théorie des faisceaux. Hermann 1958, 1960.
  • with Hervé: Zeta Function of Simple Algebras. Springer-Verlag 1972.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ see his Le site de Roger Godement ( Memento from March 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ http://smf.emath.fr/content/d%C3%A9c%C3%A8s-de-roger-godement
  3. ↑ He published these attachments and other articles on these topics on his homepage ( Memento from February 12, 2019 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Godement, Roger
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH October 1, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Le Havre
DATE OF DEATH July 21, 2016