Raoul Bott was a Hungarian-American mathematician known for numerous basic contributions to geometry in its broad sense.
11 Facts About Raoul Bott
2.
Raoul Bott's father was of Austrian descent, and his mother was of Hungarian Jewish descent; Bott was raised a Catholic by his mother and stepfather.
3.
Raoul Bott grew up in Czechoslovakia and spent his working life in the United States.
4.
Raoul Bott's family emigrated to Canada in 1938, and subsequently he served in the Canadian Army in Europe during World War II.
5.
Raoul Bott later went to college at McGill University in Montreal, where he studied electrical engineering.
6.
Raoul Bott then earned a PhD in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1949.
7.
Raoul Bott's thesis, titled Electrical Network Theory, was written under the direction of Richard Duffin.
8.
Raoul Bott continued his study at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
9.
Raoul Bott was a professor at Harvard University from 1959 to 1999.
10.
Duffin and Raoul Bott extended earlier work by Otto Brune that requisite functions of complex frequency s could be realized by a passive network of inductors and capacitors.
11.
Raoul Bott studied the homotopy theory of Lie groups, using methods from Morse theory, leading to the Bott periodicity theorem.