Cartan, Élie-Joseph

Élie-Joseph Cartan, (born April 9, 1869, Dolomieu, Fr.—died May 6, 1951, Paris), French mathematician who greatly developed the theory of Lie groups and contributed to the theory of subalgebras.

In 1894 Cartan became a lecturer at the University of Montpellier, where he studied the structure of continuous groups introduced by the noted Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie. He later examined theories of equivalence and their relation to the theory of integral invariants, mechanics, and the general theory of relativity. After he moved to the University of Lyon in 1896, he worked on linear associative algebra, developing general theorems based on the work of Benjamin Peirce of Harvard and exhibiting a subalgebra of the German mathematician Ferdinand Georg Frobenius. In 1912 Cartan became a professor at the Sorbonne, and a year later he discovered the spinors, complex vectors that are used to transform three-dimensional rotations into two-dimensional representations.

Although a profound theorist, Cartan was also able to explain difficult concepts to the ordinary student. Recognition of his work did not come until late in his life. He was made a member of the Academy of Sciences in France in 1931 and a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1947. His works include La Géométrie des espaces de Riemann (1925; “The Geometry of Riemann Spaces”) and La Théorie des groupes continus et des espaces généralisés (1935; “The Theory of Continuous Groups and Generalized Spaces”).