Georges de Rham

Georges de Rham ( born September 10, 1903 in Roche VD, Vaud, † October 9, 1990 in Lausanne) was a Swiss mathematician.

De Rham went to Lausanne to the grammar school and studied from 1921 biology, chemistry and physics at the University of Lausanne, but what he later abandoned in favor of mathematics. In 1925, he earned a licentiate in Lausanne and studied from 1926, in Paris, where he received his doctorate in 1931. He spent one semester in 1930/31 at the University of Göttingen.

In 1932 he became a lecturer at the University of Lausanne. In 1936 he became associate professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and at the same time at the University of Geneva. In 1943 he became a full professor at the University of Lausanne and in 1953 full professor in Geneva. In Lausanne he was given emeritus status in 1971, in Geneva in 1973, but remained at the university. Throughout his career, he held a number of visiting professorships: 1949 /50 and 1950 at the Harvard Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and later (1957 /58) a second time. At the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, he was in 1966.

In 1931 he succeeded in his thesis of the then difficult proof of the homotopy invariance of cohomology named after him, which was already suspected by Henri Poincaré and Élie Cartan. Later, he introduced the concept of streams (French courants ) as an extension of the concept of Laurent Schwartz distributions on manifolds.

1963 to 1966 he was president of the International Mathematical Union. He was a member of the Institut de France, the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and the Accademia dei Lincei.

De Rham was awarded the Marcel Benoist Foundation and the Prize of the city of Lausanne. He was honorary doctorates from the universities of Strasbourg, Grenoble, Lyon and the ETH Zurich.

Writings

  • Sur l' analysis situs of variétés à n dimensions, Thesis, Paris, 1931
  • Variétés différentiables: formes, courants, formes harmoniques. Paris ² 1955
  • Differentiable Manifolds: Forms, Currents, Harmonic Forms.. Berlin, 1984 ( Grundlehren Math Wiss, . 266) ISBN 3-540-13463-8
  • [Collection: ] Oeuvres Mathématiques. Geneva: L' Enseignement mathématique, Université de Genève, 1981
  • L' Argentine: description de vingt itinéraires d' escalade de quelques précédée Considérations sur leurs difficultés et leurs dangers. Lausanne, 1944.
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