Cathleen Synge Morawetz

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Cathleen Synge Morawetz (born May 5, 1923 in Toronto ; † August 8, 2017 in New York City ) was a Canadian - American mathematician who mainly dealt with partial differential equations .

Life

Cathleen Synge Morawetz was the daughter of the Irish mathematician John Lighton Synge , who z. B. is known for his books on general relativity and mechanics. Morawetz grew up in Ireland ( Dublin , 1925 to 1930) and Canada (Toronto) and in 1943 did her bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto with Cecilia Krieger (during the war she carried out military tasks as a technical assistant), and received her master’s degree in 1946 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and did his doctorate at New York University under Kurt Friedrichs on stability issues in spherical implosions ("Contracting spherical shocks treated by a perturbation method").

She previously edited the book “Supersonic flow and shock waves” by Richard Courant and Kurt Friedrichs at Bell Laboratories and worked for US Navy projects on sound propagation in the ocean. She took US citizenship in 1950 and, after a short time, worked as a research associate at MIT in 1950/51 at CC Lin (hydrodynamic stability), from 1952 at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University , where she worked in the 1950s in particular worked on the mathematics of supersonic flows, where the Courant Institute colleagues Lipman Bers and Kurt Friedrichs were also active.

In 1957 she became an assistant professor and in 1960 an associate professor. In 1965 she received a full professorship. She was director of the institute from 1984 to 1988, after having been associate director in 1978. In 1993 she retired.

Morawetz was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (since 1990), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1984), the American Philosophical Society and the Royal Society of Canada (each since 1996) and the Royal Irish Academy (since 2000) and was president of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in 1995/96 , of which she was a fellow. In 1998 she received the National Medal of Science . In 1966 and 1978 she was a Guggenheim Fellow . She received several honorary doctorates, u. a. from Princeton University in 1986. In 1997 she received the Canadian Mathematical Society's Krieger Nelson Prize . In 2004 she received the Leroy P. Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society for her life's work and in 2006 the Birkhoff Prize . In 1981 she gave the Gibbs Lecture of the AMS and in 1982 the Invited Adress of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). In 1993 she named the Association of Woman Scientists an “Outstanding Woman Scientist” and in 1983 she gave its Noether Lecture . She was a trustee of Princeton University and the Sloan Foundation . In 1962 she gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm (Approach to steady state for the wave equation) .

Morawetz lived with her husband Herbert Morawetz , a professor of polymer chemistry, at Brooklyn Polytechnic, to whom she had been married since 1945, in Greenwich Village and had four children.

plant

Morawetz was best known for her work on partial differential equations of the mixed type (hyperbolic in some regions, elliptical in others), as e.g. B. occur with flows around airfoil profiles in aerodynamics in the transition to supersonic flows. She was able to show that special wings, which were designed to avoid shock waves, generate such shock waves with the smallest changes in profile. At the same time, it created access to mathematical proof of the existence of shock waves. Her work on the scattering of electromagnetic waves and acoustic waves also had practical applications (radar, sonar). With D. Ludwig she showed that high-frequency electromagnetic waves (semi-classical borderline case) in a medium with constant speed of light and with a star-shaped reflecting body behave asymptotically like rays of geometric optics. Using similar methods (specially devised conservation laws), she previously obtained results on the decay of wave solutions outside a star-shaped scattering body. Morawetz also dealt with nonlinear wave equations. In the late 1950s she worked with Harold Grad on mathematical problems in plasma physics ( magnetohydrodynamics ).

Fonts

literature

  • Donald J. Albers, GL Alexanderson, Constance Reid More Mathematical People - Contemporary Conversations , Academic Press 1994
  • James Patterson "Cathleen Synge Morawetz" in Grinstein, Campbell (Ed.) "Woman of Mathematics", Westport, Greenwood Press, 1987
  • Christina Sormani et al. a .: The Mathematics of Cathleen Synge Morawetz, Notices AMS, 2018, No. 7

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Announcement from the American Mathematical Society , accessed August 10, 2017
  2. ^ Obituary , NYT, accessed August 10, 2017
  3. ^ Past Members: Cathleen Synge Morawetz. Royal Irish Academy, accessed April 9, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Morawetz, Cathleen Synge
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Morawetz, Cathleen S.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian-American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH May 5, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Toronto
DATE OF DEATH August 8, 2017
Place of death Greenwich Village