Eduard ÄŒech

Eduard Čech ( born June 29, 1893 in Stračov, Bohemia, † March 15, 1960 in Prague) was a Czech mathematician who worked on differential geometry and topology.

Life

Čech was the son of a policeman and studied from 1912 at the Charles University in Prague ( interrupted from 1915 to 1918 as a soldier in the First World War), to become a teacher. After that, he was a math teacher, but at the same time worked on his doctoral thesis on projective differential geometry and in 1920 received his doctorate. From 1921, he was with a scholarship from the Ministry of Education in Turin Guido Fubini, with whom he wrote a two -volume work on projective differential geometry ( 1926/27, published ). From 1922 he was a lecturer in Prague, but also taught more as a school teacher. In 1923 he became successor by the late Mathias Lerch as an adjunct professor at Masaryk University in Brno in 1928 and professor. 1935/36, he was invited by Solomon Lefschetz at Princeton. Čech made ​​Brno became a center of combinatorial topology in the 1930s. During the Second World War, he tried to maintain the seminar, even though the universities were closed by the occupiers. From 1945 he was at the University of Prague, became director of the Mathematical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and in 1952 President of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In 1956, he was director of the Mathematical Institute at the University of Prague.

In 1932, he led the Čech homology theory, and at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich in 1932, the concept of higher homotopy groups, regardless of Witold Hurewicz. In 1937 he introduced the Stone - Čech compactification of topological spaces.