Cathleen Synge Morawetz

Cathleen Synge Morawetz (born May 5, 1923 in Toronto, Canadacite web
url=http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Morawetz.html
title=Morawetz biography
accessdate=2007-05-11
last=O'Connor
first=John J.
coauthors=Edmund F. Robertson
year=2000
month=May
work=MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
publisher=School of mathematics and statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland] ) is a mathematician. Morawetz's research was mainly in the study of the partial differential equations governing fluid flow, particularly those of mixed type occurring in transonic flow. She is Professor Emerita at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at the New York University, where she has also served as director from 1984 to 1988.

Her father, John Lighton Synge was an Irish mathematician, specializing in the geometry of general relativity and her mother also studied mathematics for a time. Her childhood was split between Ireland and Canada. Both her parents were supportive of her interest in mathematics and science, and it was a woman mathematician, Cecilia Krieger, who had been a family friend for many years who later encouraged Morawetz to pursue a PhD in mathematics. Morawetz says her father was influential in stimulating her interest in mathematics, but he wondered whether her studying mathematics would be wise (suggesting they might fight like the Bernoulli brothers). [http://www.awm-math.org/noetherbrochure/Morawetz83.html]

Morawetz graduated from the University of Toronto in 1945 and received her master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D. at New York University, with a thesis on the stability of a spherical implosion.

After graduating, Morawetz got a job at Bell Laboratories where she edited "Supersonic Flow and Shock Waves" by Richard Courant and Kurt Friedrichs. She also did contract work for the United States Navy. After the war, she became an American citizen. In 1981, she delivered the Gibbs Lecture of The American Mathematical Society, and in 1982 presented an Invited Address at a meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She is a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU, where she served as director from 1984 to 1988, becoming the first woman ever to be director of a mathematics institute in the United States.

Morawetz's earliest published works were on the stability of steady viscous flows. In an early paper, she showed that there are stable modes for many Orr-Somerfeld two-point boundary value problems coming from the perturbation of steady flows, but these modes slip off to infinity in the limit of zero viscosity. As a result, they are of little interest in analyzing viscosity. Turning to the mathematics of transonic flow, she showed that specially designed shockless airfoils develop shocks if they are altered even by a small amount. This discovery opened the problem of developing a theory for a flow with shocks.

Much of Morawetz's research has focused on the wave equation. The classical problem of whether light should be treated as waves or as streams of particles can be answered, "either will do," if it can be shown that high frequency waves are, asymptotically, streams of particles moving along rays. With D. Ludwig, Morawetz showed that this is generally true for a medium with constant light speed outside a reflecting star-shaped object. She used related methods with Walter Strauss to study the behavior of a nonlinear wave equation. Throughout her career, she has followed developments in computations working with A. Bayliss, G. Kriegsman, and T. Wolfe. In her Noether Lecture, Morawetz showed a film generated by computer of some unexpected nonlinear laser effects.

Morawetz is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a former president of the American Mathematical Society. In 1998 she was awarded the National Medal of Science. In 1983 and in 1988, she was selected as a Noether Lecturer.

Morawetz now lives in Greenwich Village, NYC with her husband Herbert Morawetz, a polymer chemist. They have four children, eight grandchildren and one great grandchild. Their children are Pegeen Rubinstein, John, Lida Jeck and Nancy Morawetz (a professor at New York University School of Law who teaches in its Immigrant Rights Clinic). Upon being honored by the National Organization for Women for successfully combining career and family, she quipped, "Maybe I became a mathematician because I was so crummy at housework." She says her current nonmathematical interests are "grandchildren and sailing." [http://www.awm-math.org/noetherbrochure/Morawetz83.html]

She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was named Outstanding Woman Scientist for 1993 by the Association for Women in Science. In 1995, she became the second woman elected to the office of president of the American Mathematical Society.

References

External links

* [http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/morawetz.htm "Cathleen Morawetz", Biographies of Women Mathematicians] , Agnes Scott College
*MathGenealogy|id=19967
* [http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.awm-math.org%2Fnoetherbrochure%2FMorawetz83.html "Profiles of Women in Mathematics: Cathleen Morawetz"]