Georges Reeb
Georges Henri Reeb (12 November 1920 – 6 November 1993) was a French mathematician. He worked in differential topology, differential geometry, differential equations, topological dynamical systems theory and non-standard analysis. Reeb was born in Saverne, Bas-Rhin, Alsace, to Theobald Reeb and Caroline Engel. He started studying mathematics at University of Strasbourg, but in 1939 the entire university was evacuated to Clermont-Ferrand due to the German occupation of France. After the war, he completed his studies and in 1948 he defended his PhD thesis, entitled Propriétés topologiques des variétés feuilletées [Topological properties of foliated manifolds] and supervised by Charles Ehresmann. In 1952 Reeb was appointed professor at Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble and in 1954 he visited the Institute for Advanced Study. From 1963 he worked at Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg. There, in 1965 he created with Jean Leray and Pierre Lelong the series of meeting Rencontres entre Mathématiciens et Physiciens Théoriciens. in 1966 Reeb and Jean Frenkel founded the Institute de Recherche mathématique Avancée, the first university laboratory associated to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, which he directed between 1967 and 1972. In 1967 he was President of the Société Mathématique de France and in 1971 he was awarded the fr. In 1991 Reeb received an honorary doctorate from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and from Université de Neuchâtel. He died in 1993 in Strasbourg when he was 72 years old. Reeb was the founder of the topological theory of foliations, a geometric structure on smooth manifolds which partition them in smaller pieces. In particular, he described what is now called the Reeb foliation, a foliation of the 3-sphere, whose leaves are all diffeomorphic to , except one, which is a 2-torus. One of its first significant result, Reeb stability theorem, describes the local structure foliations around a compact leaf with finite holonomy group. His works on foliations had also applications in Morse theory.
