As a student of Cartan, the geometer Shiing-Shen Chern wrote:Usually the day after with Cartan I would get a letter from him. He would say, “After you left, I thought more about your questions...”—he had some results, and some more questions, and so on. He knew all these papers on simple Lie groups, Lie algebras, all by heart. When you saw him on the street, when a certain issue would come up, he would pull out some old envelope and write something and give you the answer. And sometimes it took me hours or even days to get the same answer... I had to work very hard.In 1921 he became a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Learning and in 1937 a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1938 he participated in the International Committee composed to organise the International Congresses for the Unity of Science.