Kostake Teleman (May 19, 1933 - December 24, 2007)

Research interests: Differential Geometry, Topology, Mathematical Physics

list of publications

“ Many of my articles refer to Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian homogeneous spaces. These articles culminated with the papers 48, 58, in which I determined Lagrangians which are invariant with respect to the conformal Lorentz group SU(2,2) and which represent relativistic two- and three-body problems.

In a group of articles I introduced what I named a generalized fundamental group and a generalized universal bundle, generalizing the classical fundamental group of Algebraic Topology and the universal covering. Whereas representations of the classical fundamental group classify flat connections, representations of the generalized fundamental group (which is infinite dimensional, even for compact manifolds) classify arbitrary connections (see for instance article 25).

It was natural to expect the existence of a formula giving the Chern character of a vectorial differentiable bundle by considering the linear representations of my generalized fundamental group (see the articles 25, 36, 37). After preliminary discussions, we - my brother Nicolae Teleman and myself - have obtained such formulae. Our formulae are equivalent, but distinct, since one of us used singular simplex de Rham cohomology, while the other used the cubic singular cohomology (see the articles 31, 32).

My interest for the physics of elementary particles began in 1971, when my wife Mihaela Teleman was preparing her Ph. D. thesis under the guidance of Horia Hulubei (a member of the French Academy of Sciences) and published in C. R. Ac. Sci. Paris two notes (see Teleman, M.: Sur un calcul des poids statistiques pour les interactions K^+p avec la consideration du groupe SU(3), C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris Série B, Physique Corpusculaire, t. 273, 321-324, 1971). During one of the final discussions related to her thesis, which concerned the use of statistical weights in the study of interactions, professor Hulubei suggested my wife to study the problem of the classification of elementary particles. Unfortunately Hulubei died on the same year so, since the problem relies on representation theory of Lie groups, I was lead to join my wife in her efforts. As a result, we published two notes in C. R. Ac. Sci. Paris on this subject (articles 38, 39), which were presented to the academy by André Lichnerowicz (see also the article 57 and the book 6). Our classification models are using the linear representations of the complex Lie groups Sp(6), respectively SO(12). Unfortunately, in our settings, there is no place for quarks. It is our aim, at this time, to create such a place. The two notes can be found here and here.

I also published a series of articles in collaboration with my daughter Ana-Maria Teleman, generalizing certain theorems of Backlund and Tzitzeica. These theorems concern special classes of congruences formed by straight lines. She also wrote a chapter in the book 10. In collaboration with my son Andrei Teleman I wrote an article on Casson handles (four-dimensional topology).

In the past I had to sign some of my articles with Costache Teleman instead of Kostake Teleman. At that time, in Romania, the letter K was considered to be cosmopolite. ”

Kostake Teleman, September 2006