Georges de Rham (French: [dəʁam]; 10 September 1903 – 9 October 1990) was a Swiss mathematician, known for his contributions to differential topology.

[1] Georges de Rham grew up in Roche but went to school in nearby Aigle, the main town of the district, travelling daily by train.

Georges de Rham started the Gymnasium in Lausanne with a focus on humanities, following his passion for literature and philosophy but learning little mathematics.

[3] At the University he was mainly influenced by two professors, Gustave Dumas and Dmitry Mirimanoff, who guided him in studying the works of Émile Borel, René-Louis Baire, Henri Lebesgue, and Joseph Serret.

Although he found inspiration for a thesis subject in Poincaré, progress was slow as topology was a relatively new topic and access to the relevant literature was difficult in Lausanne.

[8] Following this work, de Rham made several attempts to unify forms and submanifolds into a single kind of mathematical object.

In 1952 De Rham considered the converse, proving that, if there is a decomposition of the tangent bundle into vector subbundles which are invariant under the holonomy group, then the Riemannian structure must decompose as a product.