Georges Reeb

Who was Georges Reeb?

Georges Henri Reeb was a French mathematician. He worked in differential topology, differential geometry, differential equations, topological dynamical systems theory and non-standard analysis.

In 1943 he received his PhD from University of Strasbourg with the dissertation Propriétés topologiques des variétés feuilletées. His adviser was Charles Ehresmann.

In 1954, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study.

In 1965 Reeb, Jean Leray and Pierre Lelong founded a series of encounters between theoretical physicists and mathematicians in Strasbourg.

He was a professor in Grenoble and Strasbourg where he directed the Institut de Recherche Mathématique Avancée between 1967 and 1972, which he founded with Jean Frenkel in 1966.

Reeb is the founder of the topological theory of foliations, manifolds with a special local product structure.

He invented what is now called the Reeb foliation, a foliation of the 3-sphere, all the leaves of which are diffeomorphic to R², except one, which is a 2-torus.