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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).
Texto original por: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
Click on this link to see a list of the Glossary entries for this page
| List of References (12 books/articles)
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| A Poster of Maurice Fréchet | Mathematicians born in the same country
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| Cross-references to History Topics | Topology
enters mathematics |
| Other references in MacTutor | Chronology: 1900 to 1910 |
| Honours awarded to Maurice
Fréchet (Click a link below for the full list of mathematicians honoured in this way) | |
| Fellow
of the Royal Society of Edinburgh | |
| Honorary Fellow of the Edinburgh Maths Society | Elected 1938 |
| JOC/EFR December 1996 | School of
Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland | 
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| The URL of this page
is: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/Mathematicians/Frechet.htm | ||