André Haefliger

André Haefliger (ˈandreː ˈhɛːfliɡər; 22 May 1929 - 7 March 2023) was a Swiss mathematician who worked primarily on topology. Haefliger went to school in Nyon and then attended his final years at Collège de Genève in Geneva. He studied mathematics at the University of Lausanne from 1948 to 1952. He worked for two years as a teaching assistant at École Polytechnique de l'Université de Lausanne. He then moved to University of Strasbourg, then he followed Charles Ehresmann in Paris, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1958. His thesis was entitled "Structures feuilletées et cohomologie à valeurs dans un faisceau de groupoïdes" and was written under the supervision of Charles Ehresmann. Haefliger got a research fellowship for one year at the University of Paris, where he participated in the seminar of Henri Cartan, and then from 1959 to 1961 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Since 1962 he has been a full professor at the University of Geneva until his retirement in 1996. In 1966 Haefliger was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow. In 1974–75, he was president of the Swiss Mathematical Society. Haefliger obtained a Doctorate honoris causa from the ETH Zurich in 1992 and from the University of Dijon in 1997. In 2020 Haefliger and Martin Bridson were awarded the American Mathematical Society's Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition, for their book Metric Spaces of Non-Positive Curvature (Springer Verlag, 1999). Haefliger died on 7 March 2023, at the age of 93. Haefliger's main research interests were differential topology and geometry. Haefliger found the topological obstruction to the existence of a spin structure on an orientable Riemannian manifold. In two papers in the Annals he studied various embedding of spheres in relations to knot theory. He has also made important contributions in the theory of foliations, introducing the notion of Haefliger structures. He wrote more than 80 papers in peer review journals and had 20 Ph.D.