Tudor Ganea | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1922-10-17)17 October 1922 |
| Died | August 1971(1971-08-00) (aged 48) Seattle, United States |
| Resting place | Lake View Cemetery, Seattle |
| Nationality | Romanian, American |
| Alma mater | University of Bucharest University of Paris |
| Known for | Eilenberg–Ganea theorem Eilenberg–Ganea conjecture Ganea conjecture |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Bucharest Purdue University University of Washington |
| Thesis | Sur quelques invariants numeriques du type d'homotopie (1962) |
| Doctoral advisor | Henri Cartan |
| Other academic advisors | Simion Stoilow |
Tudor Ganea (October 17, 1922 –August 1971)[1] was aRomanian-American mathematician, known for his work inalgebraic topology, especiallyhomotopy theory. Ganea leftCommunist Romania to settle in theUnited States in the early 1960s.[2] He taught at theUniversity of Washington.
He studied mathematics at theUniversity of Bucharest, and then started his research as a member ofSimion Stoilow's seminar on complex functions. His papers from 1949–1952 were oncovering spaces,topological groups,symmetric products, and theLusternik–Schnirelmann category. During this time, he earned his candidate thesis in topology under the direction of Stoilow.[3]
In 1957, Ganea published in theAnnals of Mathematics a short, yet influential paper withSamuel Eilenberg, in which theEilenberg–Ganea theorem was proved and the celebratedEilenberg–Ganea conjecture was formulated. The conjecture is still open.
By 1958, Ganea and his mentee,Israel Berstein [ro], were the two leading algebraic topologists in Romania.[4] Later that year at an international conference on geometry and topology inIași, the two metPeter Hilton, starting long mathematical collaborations. Ganea left for France in 1961, where he obtained in 1962 his Ph.D. from theUniversity of Paris underHenri Cartan,[3] with thesisSur quelques invariants numeriques du type d'homotopie.[5] He then emigrated to the United States. After spending a year atPurdue University inWest Lafayette, Indiana, he joined the faculty at theUniversity of Washington inSeattle.[3]
During this time, he tried to getAurora Cornu (his fiancée at the time) out of Romania, but did not succeed.[2] In 1962, he gave an invited talk at theInternational Congress of Mathematicians inStockholm, titledOn some numerical homotopy invariants.
Just before he died, Ganea attended the Symposium on Algebraic Topology, held February 22–26, 1971 at the Battelle Seattle Research Center, in Seattle.[6] At the symposium, he was not able to give a talk, but he did distribute a preprint containing a list of unsolved problems. One of these problems, regarding the Lusternik–Schnirelmann category, came to be known asGanea's conjecture. A version of this conjecture for rational spaces was proved byKathryn Hess in her 1989MIT Ph.D. thesis.[7] Many particular cases of Ganea's original conjecture were proved, untilNorio Iwase provided a counterexample in 1998.[8] A minimum dimensional counterexample to Ganea’s conjecture was constructed by Don Stanley and Hugo Rodríguez Ordóñez in 2010.[9]
Ganea is buried atLake View Cemetery in Seattle.
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