Maurice René Fréchet

René Maurice Fréchet was a French mathematician. He made major contributions to general topology and was the first to define metric spaces. He also made several important contributions to the field of statistics and probability, as well as calculus. His dissertation opened the entire field of functionals on metric spaces and introduced the notion of compactness. Independently of Riesz, he discovered the representation theorem in the space of Lebesgue square integrable functions. He is often referred to as the founder of the theory of abstract spaces.