Founder of the Secret Society of Mathematicians

Henri Cartan, one of the leaders of a revolution in mathematics, dies at 104

In the 1930s, a group of young French mathematicians led an uprising that revolutionized mathematics. France had lost most of a generation in the First World War, so the emerging hotshots in mathematics had few elders to look up to. And when these radicals did look up, they didn’t like what they saw.