Jean-Marie Souriau

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Jean-Marie Souriau (2010)

Jean-Marie Souriau (born June 3, 1922 in Paris ; † March 15, 2012 ) was a French mathematician and mathematical physicist who dealt with symplectic geometry .

Souriau attended school in Nancy , Nîmes , Grenoble and Versailles and during the Second World War from 1942 the École normal supérieure , which was temporarily in Lyon , interrupted from military service in 1944. He attended courses with Henri Cartan , Élie Cartan , Louis de Broglie . In 1946 he acquired his aggregation in mathematics and became a scientist for the CNRS . Since he did not like the mathematical orientation in France, which at the end of the 1940s was entirely under the name of Bourbakis , he became an aircraft engineer and went to ONERA from 1947 to 1952, where he led a theory group (numerical calculations on early computers). He wrote his doctoral thesis in 1952 at the Université de Provence in Aix and Marseille on a cosmological topic with Joseph Pérès and André Lichnerowicz . From 1952 to 1958 he was first Maître de conférences and then Professeur Titulaire at the Institute de Hautes Etudes in Tunis . Since 1958 he was a professor at the University of Marseille-Aix. From 1978 to 1985 he was director of the Center for Theoretical Physics in Marseille, where he was one of the directors well into old age.

Souriau was one of the pioneers of symplectic geometry as a mathematical (geometric) theory of dynamic systems of classical mechanics and their deformation in quantum mechanics ("geometric quantization"), presented in his book Structure des systèmes dynamiques . Concepts such as the moment map and pre-quantization come from him. He classified the homogeneous symplectic manifolds. He always preferred group theoretic methods. In 1960 he proposed a model of the baryons as an octet (the group later used by Murray Gell-Mann et al is a subgroup).

In 1981 he received the Grand Prix Jaffé of the French Académie des Sciences and in 1986 the great science award of the city of Paris. He was a knight of the Ordre National de l´Mérite and the Palmes Académiques .

He was married (his wife died in 1985) and had five children.

Fonts

  • Calcul linéaire , Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1954/5, 2nd edition 1964/5, new edition by Jacques Gabay 1992.
  • Géométrie et relativité , Hermann, 1964.
  • Structure des systèmes dynamiques , Dunod, Paris, 1970
    • English translation: Structure of Dynamical Systems , Birkhäuser and Springer 1997.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Souriau, Jean-Marie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH June 3, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH March 15, 2012