Nationality French Fields Mathematics Name Roger Godement | Role Mathematician Notable students Herve Jacquet | |
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Alma mater Ecole normale superieure Doctoral students Reiji TakahashiHerve JacquetGerard SchiffmannJean-Pierre labessePaul GerardinFrancois RodierGilles Lachaud Known for Bochner–Godement theoremGodement resolution Books Analysis I: Convergence - Elementa, Zeta Functions of Simple, Analysis IV: Integration and Spec, Analysis III: Analytic and Differ, Analysis II: Differential and Integ | ||
Education Ecole Normale Superieure | ||
Hervé Jacquet - The work of Roger Godement
Roger Godement ([ɡɔdmɑ̃]; October 1, 1921 – July 21, 2016) was a French mathematician, known for his work in functional analysis as well as his expository books.
Contents
- Herv Jacquet The work of Roger Godement
- Jean Pierre Labesse Lhritage de Roger Godement
- Biography
- Selected publications
- References
Jean Pierre Labesse - L’héritage de Roger Godement
Biography
Godement started as a student at the École normale supérieure in 1940, where he became a student of Henri Cartan. He started research into harmonic analysis on locally compact abelian groups, finding a number of major results; this work was in parallel but independent of similar investigations in the USSR and Japan. Work on the abstract theory of spherical functions published in 1952 proved very influential in subsequent work, particularly that of Harish-Chandra. The isolation of the concept of square-integrable representation is attributed to him. The Godement compactness criterion in the theory of arithmetic groups was a conjecture of his. He later worked with Jacquet on the zeta function of a simple algebra.
He was an active member of the Bourbaki group in the early 1950s, and subsequently gave a number of significant Bourbaki seminars. He also took part in the Cartan seminar.
His book Topologie Algébrique et Théorie des Faisceaux from 1958 was, as he said, a very unoriginal idea for the time (that is, to write an exposition of sheaf theory); as a non-specialist, he managed to write an enduring classic. It introduced the technical method of flasque resolutions, nowadays called Godement resolutions. It has also been credited as the place in which a comonad can first be discerned.
He also wrote texts on Lie groups, abstract algebra and mathematical analysis.