His father was able later to obtain another teaching position within the secular system – it was not a job of a headship, however, and the family could not expect as high standards as they might have otherwise.

Maurice attended the secondary school Lycée Buffon in Paris where he was taught mathematics by Jacques Hadamard.

Much later Fréchet admitted that the problems caused him to live in a continual fear of not being able to solve some of them, even though he was very grateful for the special relationship with Hadamard he was privileged to enjoy.

Because of his diverse language skills, gained when his mother ran the establishment for foreigners, he served as an interpreter for the British Army.

In 1928 Fréchet decided to move back to Paris, thanks to encouragement from Borel, who was then chair in the Calculus of Probabilities and Mathematical Physics at the Sorbonne.

Fréchet briefly held a position of lecturer at the Sorbonne's Rockefeller Foundation and from 1928 was a Professor (without a chair).

As an illustration, while being nominated numerous times, he was not elected a member of the Académie des sciences until the age of 78.

[5] His first major work was his outstanding 1906 PhD thesis Sur quelques points du calcul fonctionnel, on the calculus of functionals.

Fréchet's level of abstraction is similar to that in group theory, proving theorems within a carefully chosen axiomatic system that can then be applied to a large array of particular cases.

Here is a list of his most important works, in chronological order: Fréchet also developed[7] ideas from the article Deux types fondamentaux de distribution statistique[8] (1938; an English translation The Two Fundamental Types of Statistical Distribution) of Czech geographer, demographer and statistician Jaromír Korčák.