Jean-Marie Souriau (3 June 1922,
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
– 15 March 2012,
Aix-en-Provence) was a
French mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
. He was one of the pioneers of modern
symplectic geometry.
Education and career
Souriau started studying mathematics in 1942 at
École Normale Supérieure
École may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France
* École, S ...
in Paris. In 1946 he was a research fellow of
CNRS and an engineer at
ONERA
The Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales (ONERA) is the French national aerospace research centre. It is a public establishment with industrial and commercial operations, and carries out application-oriented research to supp ...
. His PhD thesis, defended in 1952 under the supervision of
Joseph Pérès and
André Lichnerowicz
André Lichnerowicz (January 21, 1915, Bourbon-l'Archambault – December 11, 1998, Paris) was a noted French differential geometer and mathematical physicist of Polish descent. He is considered the founder of modern Poisson geometry.
Biograp ...
, was entitled "''Sur la stabilité des avions''" (On the stability of planes).
Between 1952 and 1958 he worked at Institut des Hautes Études in
Tunis
''Tounsi'' french: Tunisois
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, and since 1958 he was Professor of Mathematics at the
University of Provence
The University of Provence Aix-Marseille I (french: Université de Provence) was a public research university mostly located in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille. It was one of the three Universities of Aix-Marseille and was part of the Academy of ...
in
Marseille
Marseille ( , , ; also spelled in English as Marseilles; oc, Marselha ) is the prefecture of the French department of Bouches-du-Rhône and capital of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. Situated in the camargue region of southern Fra ...
.
In 1981 he was awarded the
Prix Jaffé of the
French Academy of Sciences.
Research
Souriau contributed to the introduction and the development of many important concepts in
symplectic geometry, arising from
classical and
quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistr ...
.
In particular, he introduced the notion of
moment map,
gave a classification of the
homogeneous symplectic manifolds (now known as the
Kirillov-
Kostant-Souriau theorem), and investigated the
coadjoint action of a
Lie group, which led to the first geometric interpretation of
spin at a classical level. He also suggested a program of
geometric quantization
In mathematical physics, geometric quantization is a mathematical approach to defining a quantum theory corresponding to a given classical theory. It attempts to carry out quantization, for which there is in general no exact recipe, in such a wa ...
and developed a more general approach to
differentiable manifolds by means of
diffeologies.
Souriau published more than 50 papers in peer-review scientific journals, as well as three monographs, on
linear algebra
Linear algebra is the branch of mathematics concerning linear equations such as:
:a_1x_1+\cdots +a_nx_n=b,
linear maps such as:
:(x_1, \ldots, x_n) \mapsto a_1x_1+\cdots +a_nx_n,
and their representations in vector spaces and through matrices ...
, on
relativity and on
geometric mechanics Geometric mechanics is a branch of mathematics applying particular geometric methods to many areas of mechanics, from mechanics of particles and rigid bodies to fluid mechanics to control theory.
Geometric mechanics applies principally to systems f ...
.
He supervised 9 PhD students.
References
External links
Jean-Marie Souriau official website(the website hosts copies of many of Souriau's works)
*
Ray F. StreaterSouriau* Patrick Iglesias-Zemmour
(in French)
* In Memoriam Conference 2012
Web site* "Structure des Systèmes Dynamiques
Anniversary Conference 2019Interview of Jean-Marie Souriau by Laurence Honnoraton
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
(in French)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Souriau, Jean-Marie
1922 births
2012 deaths
French mathematicians
École Normale Supérieure alumni
University of Provence faculty