Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat

Suzanne Yvonne Choquet - Bruhat Marie -Louise (born Bruhat; born December 29, 1923 in Lille ) is a French mathematician and theoretical physicist who deals with partial differential equations and in particular general relativity.

Life and work

Choquet - Bruhat is the daughter of the physicist Georges Bruhat (1887-1945) and the philosopher Berthe born Hubert ( 1892-1972 ). She made her 1941 high school degree ( baccalaureate ) and won the nationwide Concours général second prize in physics. She studied from 1943 mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS ) in Sèvres, where in 1946 graduated with honors, worked there then as an assistant and in 1951 with André Lichnerowicz at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique ) on proofs of existence of solutions some nonlinear partial differential equations (partly in theorems pour certains systèmes d'existence d' équations aux dérivées partial non linéaires. Acta Mathematica, Vol 88, 1952, p.141 -225 be published) doctorate. 1949-1951 she was a research assistant at the CNRS. 1951/52, she was in Princeton and in 1952 at the University of Marseille at the Institute for Advanced Study. 1958/59 she was at the University of Reims and in Paris from 1960 professor at the Faculté des Sciences and then at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, where she remained until her retirement, but continued to teach until 1992.

Choquet - Bruhat has co-authored a two- volume textbook of mathematical physics, in which consistently differential forms are used. She worked in particular on the initial value problem ( Cauchy problem ) in the general theory of relativity, relativistic hydrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics, gravitational shock waves and gauge theories.

In 1979 she was elected to the French Academy of Sciences and in 1985 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1958 she was awarded the Gold Medal of the CNRS. In 2003 she received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics with James W. York. In 1986, she held the Noether Lecture. In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice ( Problèmes Mathématiques en relativité ).

She was married to the mathematician Gustave Choquet and has two daughters and a son. She is the sister of the mathematician François Bruhat.

Writings

Monographs

• Cécile DeWitt - Morette with Margaret Dillard - Bleick: Analysis, manifolds and physics. Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2000, ISBN 0-444-50473-7
• Distributions. Théorie et problèmes. Masson, Paris 1973.
• Geometry tools différentielle et systèmes extérieures. Dunod, Paris 1968.
• Graded bundles and supermanifolds. Bibliopolis, Naples 1989.
• Problems and solutions in mathematical physics. Holden Day, San Francisco 1967.
• General Relativity and the Einstein Equations, Oxford University Press 2009

Papers

• Problème de Cauchy global en relativité générale, Séminaire Jean Leray 2, 1969-1970, pp. 1-7 (in French)
• Demetrios Christodoulou with Mauro Francaviglia: On the wave equation in curved spacetime, Annales de l' institut Henri Poincaré (A) Physique théorique 31, 1979, pp. 399-414 (English)
• Hyperbolic partial differential equations on a manifold. In: Bryce S. DeWitt, among others: Relativity, groups and topology. North -Holland, Amsterdam, 1984, ISBN 0-444-86858-5.
• Positive energy theorem. In: Bryce S. DeWitt, among others: Relativity, groups and topology II, North -Holland, Amsterdam, 1984, ISBN 0-444-86858-5.