Jean-Marie Souriau

Jean -Marie Souriau ( born June 3, 1922 in Paris, † March 15, 2012 ) was a French mathematician and mathematical physicist who worked on symplectic geometry.

Souriau attended school in Nancy, Nimes, Grenoble and Versailles and during the Second World War from 1942, the École Normale Supérieure, which was at times in Lyon, interrupted by military service in 1944. He attended courses given by Henri Cartan, Élie Cartan, Louis de Broglie. In 1946, he earned his aggregation in mathematics and was scientist for the CNRS. Since he did not like the mathematical orientation in France, which was in the late 1940s in the sign of Bourbaki, he was an aircraft engineer, in 1947 went to 1952 to the ONERA, where he led a group theory (numerical calculations on early computers). He wrote his doctoral thesis in 1952 at the Université de Provence in Aix and Marseille on a cosmological theme in Joseph Pérès and André Lichnerowicz. 1952 to 1958 he was first Maître de conférences and then Professeur de Hautes Etudes Titulaire at the Institute in Tunis. Since 1958 he was a professor at the University of Marseille -Aix. 1978 to 1985 he was Director of the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Marseille, where he was to old age of the directors.

Souriau was one of the pioneers of symplectic geometry as a mathematical ( geometric ) theory of dynamical systems of classical mechanics and their deformation in quantum mechanics ( " geometric quantization " ) presented in his book Structure of systèmes dynamiques. With him concepts come as the moment map ( moment map) and the Präquantisierung. He classified the homogeneous symplectic manifolds. He always made ​​use preferably a group-theoretic methods. In 1960, he proposed a model of baryons as octet before ( the group that was later used by Murray Gell-Mann and others, is a subset ).

In 1981 he received the Grand Prix Jaffé of the French Academy of Sciences and in 1986 the great scientific prize of the city of Paris. He was a Knight of the Ordre National de l' Mérite and the Palmes Académiques.

He was married (his wife died in 1985 ) and had five children.

Writings

• Calcul linéaire, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1954 /5, 2nd edition 1964/5, edition of Jacques Gabay 1992.
• Géométrie et relativité, Hermann, 1964.
• Structure of the systèmes dynamiques, Dunod, Paris, 1970 English translation: Structure of Dynamical Systems, Birkhäuser and Springer 1997.