Metric spaces: 100 years

[anhinga_anhinga]

I only knew Fréchet as a mathematician, who came up with the notion of derivative in normed vector spaces, which made sense to me. It turnes out that he is behind a number of fundamental definitions we are using today.

Maurice Fréchet introduced metric spaces in his work Sur quelques points du calcul fonctionnel, Rendic. Circ. Mat. Palermo 22(1906) 1-74.

The term compact was introduced by Fréchet in 1906.

Biography: Maurice René Fréchet

Comments

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

Yes, it seems that he is very underappreciated.

And especially, in his own country: "Although widely honoured, it does appear that Fréchet was more highly rated outside France than inside it. He was invited to address the International Congress of Mathematicians in Bologna in 1928 and in Oslo in 1932. He was elected to the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1929 and the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1947. He was also a member of the International Institute of Statistics. He lost out many times in elections to the Academy of Sciences, eventually being elected in 1956 when he was 78 years old.