Henri Cartan

Henri Paul Cartan was a French mathematician, born in 1904, who made substantial contributions to algebraic topology. He was the son of the mathematician Élie Cartan. After teaching at the Lycée Malherbe in Caen from 1928 to 1929, he taught at the University of Lille from 1929 to 1931 and at the University of Strasbourg from 1931 to 1939. In 1940 he returned to Paris to work at the Université de Paris and the École Normale Supérieure, and from 1969 until his retirement in 1975 he was professor at Paris-Sud University. He was the nephew of the mathematician Anna Cartan, the brother of the composer Jean Cartan, the physicist Louis Cartan and the mathematician Hélène Cartan, and the son-in-law of the physicist Pierre Weiss. He died in 2008 at the age of 104.