Josep Teixidor i Batlle

Josep Teixidor i Batlle, born in Llers in the Alt Empordà on 10 November 1920 and died there on 6 August 1989, was a Catalan mathematician who spent his career at the University of Barcelona. He began studying medicine, broke off during the Spanish Civil War, and after the war returned to university to take a degree in the exact sciences in 1943. He prepared his doctoral thesis in Rome in 1946 with Luigi Fantappié, defended it in Barcelona in 1951, and also studied in Hamburg and in Zurich, where a course with Beno Eckmann introduced him to topology. In 1957 he became professor of analytic geometry and topology at Barcelona, where he carried out a deep reform of how the subject was taught, and he introduced topology to Catalonia through the doctoral courses of 1955 and 1956. He was secretary and from 1971 to 1987 director of the journal Collectanea Mathematica, a member of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans from 1967 and president of the Catalan Society of Physical, Chemical and Mathematical Sciences. His doctoral students included Eduard Casas Alvero and Manuel Castellet.