Georges Reeb

Georges Henri Reeb, born at Saverne in Alsace on 12 November 1920 and died at Strasbourg on 6 November 1993, was a French mathematician who worked in differential topology, differential geometry, topological dynamics and non-standard analysis. He began his studies at the University of Strasbourg, which was evacuated to Clermont-Ferrand at the start of the Second World War, and took his doctorate in 1948 under Charles Ehresmann with a thesis on the topological properties of foliated manifolds. He is counted among the inventors of the theory of foliations, and several ideas carry his name: the Reeb foliation of the 3-sphere, the Reeb vector field of a contact form, and Reeb's theorem that a compact manifold with a function having only two critical points is homeomorphic to a sphere. He was appointed to Grenoble in 1952 and to Strasbourg in 1963, where he helped found a research institute that was the first university laboratory associated with the CNRS, served as president of the French Mathematical Society in 1967 and received the Petit-D'Ormoy prize of the Academy of Sciences in 1971. Late in his career he became a committed advocate of non-standard analysis.