Jean Leray
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Jean Leray (7 November 1906–10 November 1998) was a French mathematician, who worked on both partial differential equations and algebraic topology.
He was born in Nantes. He attended the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He did not join up to the Bourbaki group, although he was close with its founders.
His main work in topology was carried out while he was in a prisoner of war camp in Austria from 1940 to 1945. He concealed his expertise on differential equations, fearing that its connections with applied mathematics could lead him to be asked to do war work.
Leray's work of this period proved seminal. It originated, together, the ideas of spectral sequence and sheaf. These were subsequently developed by many others, each separately becoming an important tool in homological algebra.
He returned to work on partial differential equations from about 1950. He was awarded a Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1979.
[edit] See also
- Leray spectral sequence
- Leray cover
- Leray's theorem
- Leray-Hirsch theorem
[edit] External links
- O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "Jean Leray". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
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