1986 Lecturer: Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat
On Partial Differentials Equation of Gauge Theories and General Relativity
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat was born in Lille, France in 1923. She received her Baccalaureat (secondary school diploma) in 1941 and won the second prize in physics in the Concours General, an examination given to the best students in the country. In 1946, she received her Agregation de Mathernatique, first class, and in 1951, her Docteur des Sciences.
Choquet-Bruhat began her teaching career as a teaching assistant at the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1946. From 1949 to 1951, she was a research assistant and then a research associate at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. She spent 1951-1952 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and in 1953 joined the Faculte des Sciences de Marseille. She taught at the Universite de Riems from 1958 to 1959, and since 1960 has been Professeur Titulaire (professor with full tenure), first at the Faculte des Sciences de Paris and then at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, where she is now professor emeritus.
During her career, Choquet-Bruhat has received many honors and established an international reputation. She was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1979 and to the Arnerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985. She has been a member of the Comite International de Relativite Generale et Gravitation since 1965 and served as its president from 1980 to 1983. She has three children, two daughters and a son.
Mathematical physics is the focus of Choquet-Bruhat’s research interests, which include partial differential equations on manifolds and applications of problems arising from fundamental physics:general relativity, relativistic fluids, magneto fluids and plasmas, supergravities, and gauge theories. She has written nearly two hundred papers and a research monograph (Graded Bundles and Supermanifolds). The most recent of her five textbooks are Analysis, Manifolds, and Physics, Part I, Foundations, and Part II, 92 Applications, written in collaboration with Cecile Dewitt Morette, professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin. Choquet-Bruhat’s Noether Lecture was a survey of results about the local and global existence of partial differential equations that govern the relativistic classical fields.
