André Haefliger

André Haefliger ( May 22nd, 1929 in Nyon, Switzerland ) is a Swiss mathematician who mainly deals with topology.

Life and work

André Haefliger is the son of a bank clerk and went to high school in Geneva. He studied mathematics in Lausanne and in 1958 at Charles Ehresmann his doctorate at the University of Strasbourg ( Structures feuilletées et cohomology à valeurs dans un faisceau de groupoides ). From 1959 to 1961 he was in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study. From 1961 he was an associate, from 1962 full professor at the University of Geneva.

Haefliger made ​​important contributions to topology, for example, in knot theory and the theory of foliations.

1974/75 he was president of the Swiss Mathematical Society. He holds honorary doctorates from the ETH Zurich (1992). In 1966 he was invited speaker at the ICM in Moscow ( Knotted spheres and related geometric problems ).

His students include, inter alia Vaughan Jones.

Writings (selection )

• Structures feuilletées et cohomology à valeur dans un faisceau de groupoïdes. Comment. Math Helv 32 1958 248-329.
• Plongements différentiables de variétés dans variétés. Comment. Math Helv 36 1961 47-82.
• With Borel: La classe d' homology fondamentale d'un espace Analytique. Bull Soc. Math France 89 1961 461-513.
• With Hirsch: Immersions in the stable range. Ann. of Math ( 2) 1962 75 231-241.
• Knotted (4k -1) - spheres in 6k -space. Ann. of Math (2) 75 1962 452-466 ​​.
• Variétés feuilletées. Ann. Scuola Norm. Sup Pisa (3) 16 1962 367-397.
• Differential embeddings of Sn in Sn q for q > 2 Ann. of Math (2) 83 1966 402-436.
• With Bott: On characteristic classes of Γ - foliations. Bull Amer. Math Soc. 78 (1972 ), 1039-1044.
• Groupoïdes d' holonomy et classifiants. Transversal structure of foliations (Toulouse, 1982). No astérisque. 116 (1984), 70-97.
• With Bridson: Metric spaces of non- positive curvature. Basic teachings of Mathematical Sciences 319 Springer -Verlag, Berlin, 1999. ISBN 3-540-64324-9