- Roger Godement
Roger Godement (born in 1921) is a French mathematician, known for his work in
functional analysis , and also his expository books.He started as a student at the
École normale supérieure in 1940, where he became a student ofHenri Cartan . He started research intoharmonic analysis onlocally compact abelian group s, 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 ofspherical function s published in 1952 proved very influential in subsequent work, particularly that ofHarish Chandra . The isolation of the concept ofsquare-integrable representation is attributed to him. TheGodement compactness criterion in the theory ofarithmetic group s was a conjecture of his. He later worked with Jacquet on thezeta 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 ofsheaf theory ); as a non-specialist, he managed to write an enduring classic. It introduced the technical method offlasque resolution s. It has also been credited as the place in which acomonad can first be discerned.He also wrote texts on
Lie group s,abstract algebra andmathematical analysis .See also:
Bochner-Godement theorem ,Godement resolution External links
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