Person: Godement, Roger
Roger Godement was a French mathematician, known for his work in functional analysis and for his expository books. He was an active member of Bourbaki.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- For the first 19 years of his life Roger lived about 10 km away from the city of Le Havre.
- Godement graduated with his Agrégé de Mathématiques in 1943 and continued to undertake research at the university for his doctorate.
- Godement published three further papers in 1945, namely: Sur la presque-périodicité des fonctions spectrales Ⓣ(On the almost-periodicity of the spectral functions); Sur les fonctions de type positif Ⓣ(On the positive type functions); and Sur les propriétés ergodiques des fonctions de type positif Ⓣ(On the positive properties of ergodic type functions).
- The "functions of positive type" that Godement was studying in these papers were members of a special class of functions defined on a Banach space of bounded, complex-valued continuous functions on a locally compact group.
- Godement defended his thesis Les fonctions de type positif et la théorie des groupes Ⓣ(The positive type functions and group theory) in Paris in July 1946.
- Following the award of his doctorate, Godement was appointed to the University of Nancy in 1946.
- Godement is an exception to this, for he took a strong ethical position against the military; in particular he hated to see mathematics being used to develop weapons and other means of war.
- Godement had published nine books: Topologie Algébrique et théorie des faisceaux Ⓣ(Algebraic topology and sheaf theory) (1958); Variétés différentiables.
- On 1 October 2011, Godement celebrated his ninetieth birthday.
Born 1 October 1921, Le Havre, France. Died 21 July 2016, Paris, France.
View full biography at MacTutor
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
