René Maurice Fréchet facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Maurice Fréchet
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Maurice Fréchet
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| Born | 2 September 1878 Maligny, France
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| Died | 4 June 1973 (aged 94) Paris, France
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| Nationality | French |
| Alma mater | École Normale Supérieure |
| Known for | Metric spaces, functional analysis |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Bordeaux University of Strasbourg École des Hautes-Études École Normale Supérieure |
| Doctoral advisor | Jacques Hadamard |
| Doctoral students | Nachman Aronszajn Robert Fortet Đuro Kurepa Ky Fan Antonio Monteiro |
René Maurice Fréchet was a very important French mathematician. He was born in 1878 and lived until 1973. He helped create new ideas in mathematics, especially in areas like general topology and functional analysis. He was the first person to describe what a metric space is. Think of a metric space as a way to measure distances between points, not just in everyday space, but in more complex mathematical "spaces." His work also greatly influenced statistics and probability. Many people see him as the person who started the idea of "abstract spaces" in mathematics.
Contents
Biography
His Early Life and School Days
Maurice Fréchet was born in a small town called Maligny, France. His family was Protestant. His father was in charge of a Protestant orphanage and later a Protestant school. However, new laws in France made all education non-religious. Because of this, his father lost his job. To earn money, his mother started a guesthouse for people from other countries in Paris. His father later found another teaching job, but it wasn't as good as his old one.
Maurice went to a high school in Paris called Lycée Buffon. There, he was taught mathematics by a famous teacher named Jacques Hadamard. Hadamard saw that Maurice was very talented. He decided to teach Maurice extra lessons by himself. Even after Hadamard moved to another university, he kept writing to Maurice. He would send him math problems and give him honest feedback on his mistakes. Maurice later said that these problems sometimes made him worried, but he was very thankful for Hadamard's special help.
After high school, Maurice had to join the military. At this time, he was deciding between studying mathematics or physics. He chose math because he didn't like chemistry classes, which he would have needed for physics. So, in 1900, he went to the École Normale Supérieure to study mathematics. He started publishing his math papers very early, with four papers coming out in 1903. He even published some of his first papers with the American Mathematical Society. This was because he met American mathematicians while in Paris.
His Career and Family Life
Maurice Fréchet worked at many different schools and universities during his career. From 1907 to 1908, he was a math professor at a high school in Besançon. Then, in 1908, he moved to another high school in Nantes for a year. After that, he taught at the University of Poitiers from 1910 to 1919.
In 1908, he married Suzanne Carrive. They had four children together: Hélène, Henri, Denise, and Alain.
Serving in the First World War
Fréchet had planned to spend a year in the United States at the University of Illinois. But his plans changed when the First World War began in 1914. He was called to serve in the army on August 4th of that year. Because he was good at many languages, he worked as an interpreter for the British Army. This was a dangerous job, and he spent two and a half years very close to the front lines. Many smart people like him were sent to fight in the war, and many were lost. It's amazing that even during the war, he still managed to write important math papers, even though he had very little time for math.
After the War
After the war ended, Fréchet was chosen to go to Strasbourg. His job was to help restart the University of Strasbourg. He became a professor of advanced analysis and the director of the Mathematics Institute. Even with a lot of administrative work, he continued to do a lot of excellent research.
In 1928, Fréchet decided to move back to Paris. He was encouraged by another mathematician, Émile Borel. Fréchet first worked as a lecturer at the Sorbonne, a famous university in Paris. From 1928, he was a Professor there. He became a full professor in 1933 and took on different important roles over the years. From 1941 until he retired in 1949, he held a very important position in probability and mathematical physics. He also taught at the École Normale Supérieure. In this role, he guided many young mathematicians into studying probability.
Even with all his great achievements, Fréchet wasn't always fully recognized in France. For example, he was nominated many times, but he wasn't elected to the French Academy of Sciences until he was 78 years old. However, he did become a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1929. In 1950, he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Fréchet was also an Esperantist. This means he supported and used Esperanto, a language created to be easy for people from different countries to learn. He even published some of his papers and articles in Esperanto. He was also the president of the "International Scientific Esperantist Association" from 1950 to 1953.
Main Works and Ideas
His first big work was his amazing PhD thesis in 1906. It was called Sur quelques points du calcul fonctionnel, which means "On some points of functional calculus." In this work, Fréchet introduced the idea of a metric space. While he came up with the idea, another mathematician, Felix Hausdorff, gave it the name "metric space." Fréchet's way of thinking was very abstract. He proved mathematical rules within a carefully chosen system. These rules could then be used in many different specific situations.
Here are some of his most important books and works:
- Sur les opérations linéaires I-III, 1904–1907 (On linear operators)
- Les Espaces abstraits, 1928 (Abstract spaces)
- Recherches théoriques modernes sur la théorie des probabilités, 1937–1938 (Modern theoretical research in the theory of probability)
- Les Probabilités associées à un système d'événements compatibles et dépendants, 1939–1943 (Probabilities Associated with a System of Compatible and Dependent Events)
- Pages choisies d'analyse générale, 1953 (Selected Pages of General Analysis)
- Les Mathématiques et le concret, 1955 (Mathematics and the concrete)
Fréchet also worked on ideas from an article about two main types of statistical distribution. This article was written by a Czech expert named Jaromír Korčák.
Family
In 1908, Maurice Fréchet married Suzanne Carrive.
See also
In Spanish: Maurice Fréchet para niños
- Differentiation in Fréchet spaces
- F-space
- Fréchet derivative
- Fréchet distance
- Fréchet distribution
- Fréchet filter
- Fréchet inequalities
- Fréchet–Kuratowski theorem
- Fréchet mean
- Fréchet space
- Fréchet–Urysohn space
- Functional analysis
- Topological space
