Maurice René Fréchet

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Born: 2 Sept 1878 in Maligny, Yonne, Bourgogne, France
Died: 4 June 1973 in Paris, France

 

Maurice Fréchet was a student of Hadamard's and, under his supervision, Fréchet wrote an outstanding dissertation in 1906, introducing the concept of a metric space. He did not invent the name 'metric space' which is due to Hausdorff.

A versatile mathematician, Fréchet served as professor of mechanics at the University of Poitiers (1910-19) and professor of higher calculus at the University of Strasbourg (1920-27).

He held several different positions in the field of mathematics at the University of Paris (1928-48) including lecturer of the calculus of probabilities, professor of differential and integral calculus and professor of the calculus of probabilities.

Fréchet made major contributions to the topology of point sets and defined and founded the theory of abstract spaces. Fréchet also made important contributions to statistics, probability and calculus. In his dissertation of 1906, mentioned above, he investigated functionals on a metric space and formulated the abstract notion of compactness.

In 1907 he discovered an integral representation theorem for functionals on the space of quadratic Lebesgue integrable functions. A similar result was discovered independently by Riesz.

Fréchet's most important work includes
(i) Les Espaces abstrait (1928),
(ii) Récherchés théoretiques modernes sur la théorie des probabilités (1937-38),
(iii) Pages choisies d'analyse générale (1953),
(iv) Les Mathématiques et le concret (1955).