Cécile DeWitt-Morette

Cécile DeWitt-Morette (left) with Bryce DeWitt (right)

Cécile DeWitt-Morette , nee Morette , (born December 21, 1922 in Paris ; † May 8, 2017 in Austin , Texas ) was a French theoretical and mathematical physicist . She was the founder of the Les Houches courses in theoretical physics.

life and work

Cécile DeWitt-Morette initially wanted to be a surgeon, but then studied mathematics at the University of Caen ( licentiate in 1943). During the invasion , her sister, mother and grandmother were killed by Allied bombing in Caen, while DeWitt-Morette herself was already in Paris, where she received her doctorate in 1947 at the University of Paris (“Production of mesons by shock waves between nucleons”). From 1944 to 1965 she was Maître de Recherche at the CNRS . In 1946/47 she was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Dublin with Erwin Schrödinger , 1947/48 Rask-Oersted Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen , 1948 to 1950 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and from 1951/52 a scientist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay . From 1952 to 1955 she was a researcher and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley . From 1956 she was Visiting Research Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , as was her husband since 1950, the physicist Bryce DeWitt . While her husband soon became a professor, she did not become a lecturer until 1967, but was director of the university's Institute for Natural Sciences from 1957. From 1965 to 1988 she was also at the University of Grenoble (whose Les Houches School she founded), most recently as an associate professor. From 1972 she was professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin . From 1983 she was professor of physics there. In 1973 she became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . It is common in France e.g. B. at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) and the Les Houches summer schools and was a visiting professor in Rio de Janeiro (Centro de Pesquisa Fisica, 1949), the Imperial College London , the University of Bielefeld (1984), the University of Warwick and the University of Madeira .

In 1951 she was the founder of the famous summer school for theoretical physics at the University of Grenoble in Les Houches in the French Alps ( École de Physique des Houches ), which received funding from NATO from 1958 and of which she was director until 1972. She founded the school in order to get a scientific connection in theoretical physics in post-war France, especially in the United States. From 1967 to 1972 she also organized conferences (Rencontres) of the Batelle Institute, such as the one published as "Relativity, Groups and Topology" with John Archibald Wheeler , which in the 1960s preceded the connection and exchange of modern mathematics with theoretical physics of the various String theory conferences from the 1980s - at that time still in the field of general relativity . In 1972/73 she and her husband led a Texan expedition to check the light deflection test of the general theory of relativity during a solar eclipse in Mauritania .

Shortly after their introduction by Richard Feynman in 1948, DeWitt-Morette dealt with path integrals in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory (QFT) and their mathematical treatment in function spaces (functional integrals ) and the relationship with stochastic differential equations . She also investigated path integrals in topologically non-trivial (multiply connected) spaces early on. As early as 1971 she described possible phenomena of particles with unusual statistics (“ Anyon ”) in two dimensions , which were only discussed by Frank Wilczek and others in the 1980s as an explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect . She also explored applications of representations of an extension of the spin group, called the pin group, in physics.

From 1977 to 1980 and 1993 to 1996 she was co-editor of the Journal of Mathematical Physics . In 1981 she became a knight of the French Ordre national du Mérite and in 1991 of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques . In 1992 she received the Prix du Rayonnement Français.

DeWitt-Morette listed trekking , judo , skiing , windsurfing , embroidery and skydiving as pastimes . She had four daughters, including the writer Abigail DeWitt, who processed some of her mother's experiences in her novel Lili .

Fonts

• Particules Elementaires. Hermann, Paris 1951
• with Margaret Dillard-Bleick, Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat : Analysis, Manifolds and Physics. 2 volumes, North Holland 1977, 1989.
• with A. Maheshwari, Bruce Nelson: Path Integrals in Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics. In: Physics Reports. Volume 50, 1979, pp. 255-372
• with Pierre Cartier : Functional Integration: Actions and Symmetries. Cambridge Monographs in Mathematical Physics 2006
• As editor of Les Houches Schools a. a. with Bryce DeWitt: Relativity Groups and Topology. Gordon and Breach 1963; Black holes. Gordon and Breach 1972

Web links

• Page DeWitt-Morettes at the University of California, Los Angeles (English)
• Biography / Interview with Senior Woman (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Décès de Cécile DeWitt-Morette. In: Société française de physique. May 11, 2017, accessed May 12, 2017 (French). 
2. ↑ Physics Today 71, 2, 64 (2018); doi: 10.1063 / PT.3.3853
3. ↑ According to her own statements, she initially only studied there in order to be able to stay in Paris, after the death of large parts of her family she had to find a job.
4. ^ DeWitt-Morette: On the definition and approximation of Feynman's path integral. In: Physical Review. Volume 81, 1951, pp. 848-852.
5. ↑ with M. Laidlaw: Feynman Functional Integrals for Systems of Indistinguishable Particles. In: Physical Review D. Volume 3, 1971, pp. 1375-1378.
6. ↑ introduced by Michael Atiyah , Raoul Bott , A. Shapiro 1964
7. ↑ with Bryce DeWitt: Pin Groups in Physics. In: Physical Review D. Volume 41, 1990, p. 1201.