Jacques Feldbau, topologist. The fate of a Jewish mathematician (1914 -- 1945). Transl. from the French (Q658961)

Jacques Feldbau (1914-1945) was a French topologist, who took briefly part in the war as a pilot and who as a Jew was deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis. He died shortly before liberation. The booklet is a German translation of the French original from 2009. The author is a mathematician but has worked with original archival material as well, in particular from the Académie des Sciences and from private possession. In the translation some of the French contexts are explained by additional notes. Several portraits and copies from documents are reproduced as well. Feldbau's mathematical work is explained in the first chapter. Feldbau was a disciple of Charles Ehresmann and had several important results in algebraic topology. In particular he proved that a locally trivial fibration with a contractible base is globally trivial. Due to the anti-Semitic laws in Vichy France he was not permitted to teach and his name was removed from one of his papers although he had assumed the pseudonym Laboureur in order to hide his real name. Because Feldbau was a student in Strasbourg and Clermont-Ferrand (to which the university was evacuated) until 1943 before deportation, the book is at the same time a contribution to the history of the University of Strasbourg and its mathematical institute.