Sunday, December 18, 2011
How spectral sequences started
... By a Frenchie guy in Stalag 17, who got sick of solving stoopid PDEs, and started looking at \CDs, instead. His main work in topology was carried out while he was in a prisoner of war camp in Edelbach, Austria from 1940 to 1945. He concealed his expertise on differential equations, fearing that its connections with applied mathematics could lead him to be asked to do war work. Leray's work of this period proved seminal to the development of spectral sequences and sheaves. These were subsequently developed by many others, each separately becoming an important tool in homological algebra. He returned to work on partial differential equations from about 1950.
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9 comments:
He was as fortunate as Banach was not.
Did you click on the pdf file? It's a good read.
Good read? Hahah...
Standard Rotter comment. Whatevah.
The most annoying idea is that of spectral sequence. It's a solution to a universal mapping property or whatevah, right?
Duh.
Didn't you lecture at some point on the subject? Or was it Mr Leverkühn? More likely.
I think you told me what to say. Then I got it all wrong.
It's an acquired taste. Like bitter.
I think it was a bitter that put me in the hospital...
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