Maurice-René Fréchet

Fréchet, Maurice-René 

Born Sept. 2, 1878, in Maligny; died June 4, 1973, in Paris. French mathematician.

Fréchet was a professor at the University of Strasbourg from 1919 to 1927 and at the University of Paris from 1928 to 1949. His principal works deal with topology and functional analysis; he introduced the modern abstract concepts of metric space, compactness, and completeness. Contributions were also made by him to probability theory.

Fréchet became a member of the Netherlands Academy of Sciences in 1950 and the Institut de France in 1956 and was a member of many French and foreign scientific societies, including the Moscow Mathematical Society.

WORKS

Sur Quelques Points de calcul fonctionnel. Paris, 1906.
Les Espaces abstraits et leur théorie concidérée comme introduction à l’analyse générale. Paris, 1928.