Marie-Hélène Schwartz (1913 – 5 January 2013) was a French mathematician, known for her work on characteristic numbers of spaces with singularities...

Education and career

Born Marie-Hélène Lévy, she was the daughter of mathematician Paul Lévy and the great-granddaughter of philologist

Henri Weil Henri Weil (August 27, 1818 – November 5, 1909) was a French philologist. Biography Born to a Jewish family in Frankfurt, he was educated at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Leipzig. He went to France, and continued his studies at Paris ...

. After studying at the

Lycée Janson-de-Sailly Lycée Janson-de-Sailly is a ''lycée'' located in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France. The ''lycéens'' of Janson are called ''les jansoniens'' and they usually refer to their high school as Janson, or JdS. It is the biggest academic inst ...

, she began studies at the

École Normale Supérieure École or Ecole may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing i ...

in 1934 but contracted

tuberculosis Tuberculosis (TB), also known colloquially as the "white death", or historically as consumption, is a contagious disease usually caused by ''Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can al ...

which forced her to drop out. She married another Jewish mathematician,

Laurent Schwartz Laurent-Moïse Schwartz (; 5 March 1915 – 4 July 2002) was a French mathematician. He pioneered the theory of Distribution (mathematics), distributions, which gives a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function. He was awar ...

, in 1938, and both soon went into hiding while the Nazis occupied France. After the war, she taught at the

University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne The University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (; URCA), also known simply as the University of Reims, is a public university based in Reims, France. In addition to the main campus in Reims, the university has several campuses located throughout t ...

and finished a thesis on generalizations of the Gauss–Bonnet formula in 1953. In 1964, she moved to the

University of Lille The University of Lille (, abbreviated as ULille, UDL or univ-lille) is a French public research university based in Lille, Hauts-de-France. It has its origins in the University of Douai (1559), and resulted from the merger of three universities ...

, from where she retired in 1981.

Recognition

A conference was held in her honour in Lille in 1986, and a day of lectures in Paris honoured her 80th birthday in 1993, during which she presented a two-hour talk herself. She continued publishing mathematical research into her late 80s.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Schwartz, Marie-Helene 1913 births 2013 deaths 20th-century French Jews French mathematicians French women mathematicians 20th-century French women scientists