The second woman president of AMS dies at age 94

Cathleen Synge Morawetz, the second woman to serve as president of the AMS (1995-1996) and the first to receive the National Medal of Science (1998) for work in mathematics, died August 8 at the age of 94. Morawetz was professor emerita at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and worked in partial differential equations, establishing important results in the study of shock waves, scattering theory, transonic flow, and the nonlinear wave equation.

Morawetz, whose father John Lighton Synge was also a mathematician, received her PhD from New York University in 1951 under the direction of Kurt Friedrichs. She then held a position as a research associate at MIT but returned to the Courant Institute after one year, later serving as its director from 1984 to 1988, and retiring in 1993.

Morawetz received several prizes and honors, including the 2004 Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the 2006 Birkhoff Prize, election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, was the Gibbs lecturer in 1981, and was a member of the inaugural class of AMS Fellows in 2012. Among those achievements, she was often the first or only woman to be so honored.

In her response to being awarded the Steele Prize, Morawetz wrote: “I am forever indebted to my mother for instilling in me the idea of ambition (then very unladylike) and to my father for the idea of intellectual achievement (not to mention the introduction to [Richard] Courant).” For more information on Morawetz’ work and life, see her biography in the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, her page on the AMS Presidents Timeline, “Happy 91st, Cathleen Synge Morawetz,” by Allyn Jackson, from the May 2014 issue of Notices, and an interview by Siobhan Roberts posted by the Simons Foundation, “Science Lives: Cathleen Morawetz.”

Fonte: American Mathematical Society