Re: looking for Fréchet's 1906 Ph.D. dissertation introducing metric spaces

Thank you for your helpful and informative reply. I appreciate it.

I don't believe this journal is on-line, at least not
freely available.

I would be willing to settle for a non-freely available one. I do have
access to a number of (regrettably) non-free archives (such as JSTOR)
through my university.

However, assuming
you can read French, you may find much of the motivation
and approach difficult to follow,

Despite the quote in my post from Abel ("... one should study the
masters and not the pupils"), in practice I don't follow this. That
is, I think that rather than learning from the master that introduced
a concept while that concept was still in an immature state, it is
better to learn from a pupil that has mastered the concept after the
concept reached maturity and can connect it "in a natural illuminating
way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas" (G.H. Hardy).

For example, rather than learning about metric spaces from Frechet's
1906 dissertation, I would think it more expedient to learn about them
from Rudin's "Principles of Mathematical Analysis" or some other
standard text.

The reason that I look for these old classic papers is not so much to
learn mathematical concepts from them, but rather to reference them in
the stuff I write about to give myself and potential readers some idea
of where and when and how a link in the web of mathematics came to be.
I think knowing such background information is helpful and
enlightening, even though not directly related to the concept itself.

And I guess the reason why I like to give online web links to these
sources is it kind of gives readers a sense of empowerment. It gives
them the sense that the classic math papers that made history are not
just available to researchers in a ~900 year old Oxford University or
an ivy league school, but are available to anyone with an internet
connection in any country no matter how impoverished.

I know that there is more and more intellectual material available
online. And I don't like to be a whiner. But to be honest, it is a
little difficult for me to understand how papers that have
revolutionized mathematics (like Frechet's 1906 paper introducing
metric spaces or Legesgue's 1902 paper introducing Lebesgue
integration) can remain so elusive and difficult to access. This is
intellectual history that has changed the thinking of mankind.
Shouldn't that mean something to someone enough to make it easily
accessible to all? What if the U.S.'s "Bill of Rights" was as
difficult to access? England's "Magna Carta"? The Code of Hammurabi?

Enough whining from me.
Thank you again for your help!
I wish you the best in your work.
Dan Greenhoe


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