 Maurice Fréchet

Maurice Fréchet was a mathematician whose 1906 dissertation helped establish the abstract study of metric spaces and functionals. His work made it possible to treat points, sequences and functions within a common framework of distance and convergence. He also contributed to probability theory and the representation of functionals.^[ref] For example, the distance between two continuous functions can be their largest pointwise difference. With that choice, convergence in the metric is uniform convergence. The abstraction is productive because a theorem proved using only metric properties can then apply to many spaces whose elements look completely different.