Elie Joseph Cartan (1869-1951). Born in Dolomien near
Chambéry, France. Student at l‘École Normale since 1888, he
received his Ph.D. in 1894 with a thesis in which he completed
Killing’s classification of semisimple algebras. He lectured at
Montpellier (1894-1903), Lyon (1896-1903), Nancy (1903-1909), and
Paris (1909-1940). His following work on the representation of
semisimple Lie groups combines group theory, classical geometry,
differential geometry, and topology. From 1904 he worked on
differential equations and differential geometry, and developed a
theory of moving frames (calculus of differential forms). He also
contributed to the geometry of symmetric spaces and published on
general relativity and its geometric extensions as well as on the
theory of spinors. For his Collected Works, cf. [41].