Raoul Bott

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Raoul Bott

1923-

Hungarian mathematician who helped to develop techniques for analyzing geometric figures representing closed paths (loops) in multidimensional space. While techniques for determining the lengths of such paths existed, they all required approximating the path in a "piece-wise" manner, similar to approximating the circumference of a circle by constructing many-sided polygons. Bott helped to develop more exact methods of doing this task in any number of spatial dimensions.