Lefschetz

Solomon Lefschetz

Born: 3 Sept 1884 in Moscow, Russia
Died: 5 Oct 1972 in Princeton, New Jersey, USA

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Lefschetz was a Russian born Jewish mathematician who was the main source of the algebraic aspects of topology.

Lefschetz trained to be an engineer in Paris but he had the misfortune to lose both his hands in a laboratory accident. This mishap was fortunate for mathematics for at the age of 36 Lefschetz went to the USA became a mathematician. On Alexander's recommendation, in 1924, Lefschetz went to Princeton.

He had two artificial hands over which he always wore a shiny black glove. First thing every morning a graduate student had to push a piece of chalk into his hand and remove it at the end of the day.

Lefschetz proved a number of fixed-point theorems, which study points that do not move under a given transformation. He applied these theorems to developing important formulas for points that remain fixed when a manifold is subjected to a continuous mapping onto itself.

Another of Lefschetz's important results was a deep generalisation of Émile Picard's theorems in function theory to several complex variables. Lefschetz was able to go further than Émile Picard and incorporate Poincaré's ideas. In doing this he developed a theory of algebraic topology of algebraic varieties of higher dimension.

The word topology comes from the title of a monograph by Lefschetz wrote in 1930.

He was the editor of the Annals of Mathematics from 1928 to 1958, bringing it up to the standard of one of the very best world class journals.

Lefschetz did remarkable work even well into his 80's. In his last book he wrote on recent ideas outside his own area, namely the topology of Feymann integrals.

Other Web sites:

Clarke University, USA

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. P Griffiths, D C Spencer and G W Whitehead, Solomon Lefschetz, Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences 61 (1990).
  3. W Hodge, Solomon Lefschetz, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 19 (1973).
  4. W Hodge, Solomon Lefschetz, Bull. London Math. Soc. 6 (1974), 198-217. 
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