Roger Godement

Roger Godement ( born October 1, 1921 in Le Havre ) is a French mathematician who worked among others with harmonic analysis and functional analysis. In France he is known for his textbooks.

Godement studied from 1940 at the École supérieure normal with Henri Cartan (Dissertation Les fonctions de la théorie et positif type of groupes ). He taught from 1946 to 1955 at the University of Nancy and then at the Faculté des Sciences in Paris, and later the University of Paris VII Denis Diderot until 1990.

He achieved important results for the harmonic analysis on locally compact abelian groups. His work on the abstract theory of spherical harmonics ( harmonic analysis on the sphere ) and his concept of square-integrable representation of Harish - Chandra influenced, among others, who shaped the further development of the theory of infinite-dimensional representations of Lie groups prevail. In the theory of arithmetic groups he suspected a named after him compactness criterion. Later he worked with his doctoral Hervé Jacquet on the zeta function of simple algebras.

Godement was the 1950s, a member of the Bourbaki group of French mathematician and active in Séminaire Bourbaki and the seminar by Henri Cartan since the beginning. His book topology algébrique et Théorie des Faisceaux 1958 became influential as an early textbook of sheaf theory.

Among his doctoral Christophe Soulé (1979) and Hervé Jacquet.

Writings

• Analysis mathématique. 4 volumes, Springer-Verlag 1998-2001.
• Cours d' algèbre. Hermann 1963, 1966.
• Algebra. Hermann 1968.
• Topology algébrique et théorie of Faisceaux. Hermann 1958, 1960.
• Hervé: Zeta Function of Simple Algebras. Springer -Verlag 1972.