Henri Cartan

Henri Cartan, son of the mathematician Elie Cartan, was born in 1904 in Nancy. He obtained his doctorate in mathematics from the Ecole normale supérieure, Paris. He taught at the University of Lille (1929) and the University of Strasbourg (1931-1940), participating in the establishment of relations with German mathematicians as demonstrated by his work on the Cartan-Thullen theorem (1931). In 1935, he married Nicole, daughter of the physicist Pierre Weiss. Cartan became Professor at the Sorbonne in 1940. This period was marked by the execution of his brother Louis Cartan, a physicist and member of the French Resistance, who was imprisoned and then executed by the Nazis in 1943. At the time of the Liberation, Cartan was seconded to the University of Strasbourg (1945-1947). In 1956, he welcomed the creation of the Association européenne des enseignants (AEDE), which was created during a session of the Centre international de formation européenne (CIFE), founded within the Mouvement fédéraliste européen (MFE) by Alexandre Marc to promote education. Cartan was appointed President of the French section from 1956 to 1974. In the wake of the Paris student riots of May 1968, he led the Comité de liaison pour une action fédéraliste (CLAF) which called for "a new, and authentically socialist and democratic society". From 1970, Cartan taught at the University of Orsay until the end of his career in 1975. Following his resignation as President of the AEDE in June 1974, Cartan concentrated his efforts on human rights. During the Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver (1974), he announced his commitment to the fight for the liberation of his colleagues throughout the world and founded the Committee of Mathematicians. Soviet dissidents Leonid Plyushch and Andrei Sakharov were two of the beneficiaries of his support. During this period, Cartan was elected president of MFE, which became the French branch of the new Union of European Federalists (UEF) (1973-1985). Cartan was involved in the campaign for the election of the European Parliament by direct elections and became head of the list for a "United States of Europe" in 1984. After his departure from the presidency of the MFE (1985), he became a founding member of the Rassemblement pour une Europe fédérale (1990), the electoral body of the MFE. He later participated in the Groupe permanent pour une Europe démocratique (GPED) which came into being in 1995 following merger of the REF with the MFE and the Action fédérale Socialisme et Liberté (AFSL). Henri Cartan published extensively in the scientific field: "Homological Algebra" (1956) and "Elementary Theory of Analytic Functions of One or Several Complex Variables" (1963) are some of his most important works. His work was recognised with various prizes and honours in France and abroad, including: Member of the Academy of Sciences (1974), gold medal of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) (1976), the Wolf Prize (1980), Commander of the Légion d'honneur (1989), and the Pagels Award of la New York Academy of Sciences (1989). Henri Cartan died in Paris in August 2008 at the age of 104.