Paulette Libermann

Paulette Libermann (born November 14, 1919 in Paris , † July 10, 2007 in Montrouge ) was a French mathematician who mainly dealt with differential geometry and symplectic geometry .

Live and act

Libermann grew up in Paris and began her studies at the age of 19 from 1938 at the “Ecole Normale Superieure des jeunes filles” (today affiliated to the ENS ) in Sèvres . Since she was unable to take a teacher’s examination as a Jew during the German occupation in 1940, Élie Cartan , one of the leading French mathematicians, suggested that she go into research. From 1942 she hid from the Nazis with her parents and two sisters in Lyon . On September 3, 1944, Lyon was liberated from the German occupation and in the same year she passed her teaching examination and began teaching, but then studied in Oxford from 1945 to 1947 and then received her doctorate from Charles Ehresmann at the Université Louis Pasteur Strasbourg in 1953 ( Sur leproblemème d'équivalence de certaines structures infinitésimales , Annali di Matematica Pura ed Applicata 1954), while at the same time she taught at a girls' high school in Strasbourg from 1947. Already in her dissertation she dealt with symplectic geometry (and its scrolls and almost complex structures on them). After Michèle Audin , she anticipated later developments by Michail Gromow and Alan Weinstein . Afterwards she was at the University of Rennes and from 1966 professor at the University of Paris - one of the few mathematics professors in France. She was visiting scholar at numerous universities, e. B. Oxford, Berkeley , MSRI , the National Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro and Argentina.

She wrote a textbook on symplectic geometry and mechanics with Marle.

In 1962 she gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( Connexions d´ordre superieure ).

Fonts

• with Charles-Michel Marle: Symplectic Geometry and Analytic Mechanics. Reidel, Boston 1987.

literature

• Michèle Audin: Differential Geometry, Strasbourg, 1953 ( PDF file, 5.2 MB), Notices of the AMS 55, March 2008, pp. 366–370 (English; with picture)

Web links

• Paulette Libermann - Biography at Agnes Scott College by Lawrence H. Riddle, March 15, 2011 (English)
• Charles-Michel Marle : Homage to Paulette Libermann (November 14, 1919 - June 10, 2007) . In: Gazette des Mathématiciens . No. 114 , October 2007, p. 50-53 ( PDF ).
• Yvette Kosmann-Schwarzbach : Homage to Paulette Libermann (1919-2007) . In: Gazette des Mathématiciens . No. 114 , October 2007, p. 53-54 ( PDF ).
• Yvette Kosmann-Schwarzbach: Women mathematicians in France in the mid-twentieth century (Arxiv 2015)