André Haefliger

Haefliger went to school in Nyon and then attended his final years at Collège de Genève in Geneva.

[1] His thesis was entitled "Structures feuilletées et cohomologie à valeurs dans un faisceau de groupoïdes" and was written under the supervision of Charles Ehresmann.

[2] Haefliger got a research fellowship for one year at the University of Paris, where he participated in the seminar of Henri Cartan, and then from 1959 to 1961 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Haefliger found the topological obstruction to the existence of a spin structure on an orientable Riemannian manifold.

[11] He wrote more than 80 papers in peer review journals[12] and had 20 Ph.D. students, including Augustin Banyaga and the future Field Medalist Vaughan Jones.