Cathleen Synge Morawetz

Cathleen Synge Morawetz (born May 5, 1923 in Toronto, Canada) 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. She was awarded National Medal of Science in 1998.

Childhood

Morawetz's 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).

Education

Morawetz graduated from the University of Toronto in 1945 and received her master's degree in 1946 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Morawetz got a job at New York University where she edited Supersonic Flow and Shock Waves by Richard Courant and Kurt Friedrichs. She earned her Ph.D. in 1951 at New York University, with a thesis on the stability of a spherical implosion, under the supervision of Kurt Otto Friedrichs. Her thesis was titled, "Contracting Spherical Shocks Treated by a Perturbation Method." She became an American citizen in 1951.

Career

After earning her doctorate, Morawetz spent a year as a research associate at MIT before returning to work as a research associate at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU, for five more years. During this time she had no teaching requirements and could focus purely on research. She published work on a variety of topics in applied mathematics including viscosity, compressible fluids and transonic flows. Turning to the mathematics of transonic flow, she showed that specially designed shockless airfoils develop shocks if they are perturbed even by a small amount. This discovery opened up the problem of developing a theory for a flow with shocks. Subsequently the shocks she predicted mathematically have been experimentally observed as air flows around the wing of a plane.

In 1957 she became an assistant professor at Courant. At this point she began to work more closely with her colleagues publishing important joint papers with Peter Lax and Ralph Phillips on the decay of solutions to the wave equation around a star shaped obstacle. She continued with important solo work on the wave equation and transonic flow around a profile until she was promoted to full professor by 1965. At this point her research expanded to a variety of problems including papers on the Tricomi equation the nonrelatavistic wave equation including questions of decay and scattering. Her first doctoral student, Lesley Sibner, graduated in 1964. In the 1970s she worked on questions of scattering theory and the nonlinear wave equation.

She is Professor Emerita at Courant, 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.

Honors

In 1980 Morawetz won a Lester R. Ford Award. In 1981, she became the first woman to deliver 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 received honorary degrees from Eastern Michigan University in 1980, Brown University and Smith College in 1982, and Princeton in 1990. In 1983 and in 1988, she was selected as a Noether Lecturer. She 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. In 1998 she was awarded the National Medal of Science; she was the first woman to receive the medal for work in mathematics. In 2004 she received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. In 2006 she won the George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics. In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Morawetz is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences; she was the first woman to belong to the Applied Mathematics Section of the National Academy of Sciences.

Doctoral students

• Lesley Sibner, New York University, 1964
• Barry Marder, New York University, 1969
• Chin-Hung Ching, New York University, 1971
• Charles Weber, New York University, 1976
• Wei Tseng, New York University, 1976
• Michael Pilant, New York University, 1982, 1
• Christian Klingenberg, New York University, 1983
• Lynne Ipina, New York University, 1986
• Paulo Zingano, New York University, 1990

Personal life

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 manages its Immigrant Rights Clinic). Upon being honored by the National Organization for Women for successfully combining career and family, Morawetz quipped, "Maybe I became a mathematician because I was so crummy at housework." She says her current nonmathematical interests are "grandchildren and sailing."

References

This article incorporates material from Cathleen Morawetz on PlanetMath, which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.