Tudor Ganea

Tudor Ganea (October 17, 1922 –August 1971)[1] was a Romanian-American mathematician, known for his work in algebraic topology, especially homotopy theory. Ganea left Communist Romania to settle in the United States in the early 1960s.[2] He taught at the University of Washington.

Life and work

In 1957, Ganea published in the Annals of Mathematics a short, yet influential paper with Samuel Eilenberg, in which the Eilenberg–Ganea theorem was proved and the celebrated Eilenberg–Ganea conjecture was formulated. The conjecture is still open.

By 1958, Ganea and his mentee, Israel Bernstein, were the two leading algebraic topologists in Romania.[3] Later that year at an international conference on geometry and topology in Iași, the two met Peter Hilton, starting long mathematical collaborations. Ganea emigrated to Western Europe in 1961, and later came to the United States. He tried to get Aurora Cornu (his fiancée at the time) out of Romania, but did not succeed.[2]

In 1962, he gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm, titled On some numerical homotopy invariants.

Just before he died, Ganea attended the Symposium on Algebraic Topology, held February 22–26, 1971 at the Battelle Seattle Research Center, in Seattle.[4] At the symposium, he was not able to give a talk, but he did distribute a preprint containing a list of unsolved problems. One of these problems, regarding the Lusternik–Schnirelmann category, came to be known as Ganea's conjecture. A version of this conjecture for rational spaces was proved by Kathryn Hess in her 1989 MIT Ph.D. thesis.[5] Many particular cases of Ganea's original conjecture were proved, until Norio Iwase provided a counterexample in 1998.[6]

Ganea is buried at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle.[7]

References
  1. Biographical information
  2. Cistelecan, Alexandru (May 26, 2006). "Iritarea la români". Bucureștiul Cultural, nr. 7/2006 (in Romanian). Revista 22. Retrieved May 3, 2020.
  3. Israel Berstein, June 23, 1926—September 22, 1991
  4. Hilton, Peter J., ed. (1971). Symposium on Algebraic Topology. Battelle Seattle Research Center, Seattle, Wash., 22–26 February 1971. Dedicated to the memory of Tudor Ganea (1922–1971) (PDF). Lecture Notes in Mathematics. 249. Berlin-New York: Springer-Verlag. MR 0328907.
  5. Hess, Kathryn P. (1991). "A proof of Ganea's conjecture for rational spaces". Topology. 30 (2): 205–214. doi:10.1016/0040-9383(91)90006-p. MR 1098914.
  6. Iwase, Norio (1998). "Ganea's conjecture on Lusternik–Schnirelmann category". Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society. 30 (6): 623–634. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.509.2343. doi:10.1112/S0024609398004548. MR 1642747.
  7. Tudor Ganea at Find a Grave

Publications

Quote

My algebraic topology professor, Tudor Ganea, used to say that "mathematics progresses by faith and hard work, the former augmented and the latter diminished by what others have done".

From: "Eightfold Way: The Sculpture", by Helaman Ferguson with Claire Ferguson, in The Eightfold Way: The Beauty of Klein's Quartic Curve, edited by Silvio Levy, MSRI Publications, vol. 35, 1998

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