Maurice Fréchet was one of the creators of the 20th-century discipline of topology, which deals with the properties of geometric configurations; his research added a new degree of abstractness to the mathematical advances of the previous generation. He profited from a rich mathematical environment during his studies and in turn passed on a wealth of ideas to his students over a long career. Some of the mathematicians who had learned their skills before Fréchet's work appeared could not help wondering whether there were advantages to the new degree of generality in his work. The answer lay in the fruitfulness of the methods of Fréchet for addressing problems whose solution included concrete problems of long standing.

René Maurice Fréchet was born on the 10th of September in 1878 in Maligny, a small town in provincial France, where his father Jacques directed...