Roger Godement

Roger Godement (1921 to 2016) was a French mathematician known for his work in functional analysis and for his expository books. He studied at the École normale supérieure from 1940, where he became a student of Henri Cartan, and began research on harmonic analysis on locally compact abelian groups. His 1952 work on the abstract theory of spherical functions strongly influenced Harish-Chandra, and the concept of square-integrable representation is attributed to him. He was an active member of the Bourbaki group in the early 1950s. His 1958 book Topologie algébrique et théorie des faisceaux, an exposition of sheaf theory, became a classic and introduced the technique now called Godement resolutions, and with Hervé Jacquet he worked on the zeta function of a simple algebra. He also wrote texts on Lie groups, algebra and mathematical analysis.