Chercheurs

Mathématiques / MORAWETZ, CATHLEEN S.

Position

Professor Emeritus at New York University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

Cathleen Morawetz was Director of the Courant Institute of the Mathematical Sciences, New York University, from 1984 to 1988. She was President of the American Mathematical Society from 1995 to 1997, and its Gibbs Lecturer in 1981.

Thèmes de recherche

Morawetz\'s earliest published works were on the stability of steady viscous flows. In the fifties, she turned to the mathematics of transonic flow, and showed that specially designed shockless airfoils develop shocks if they are altered even by a small amount. The discovery opened the problem of developing a theory for transonic flow with shocks.

Much of her research has focused on the wave equation. The classical problem of whether light should be treated as waves or as streams of particles can be answered, \"either will do,\" if it can be shown that high frequency waves are. asymptotically, streams of weightless particles moving along ray. With D. Ludwig, Morawetz showed that this is true for a medium with constant light speed outside a reflecting star-shaped object. She used related methods with Walter Strauss to study the behavior of a semilinear wave equation. Throughout her career, Morawetz has turned to developments in computations working with A. Bayliss, G. Kriegsman, and T. Wolfe. In her Noether Lecture, she showed a film generated by computer of some unexpected nonlinear laser effects. Today, her interests are divided between working in fluid dynamics, mainly the mathematics of transonic flow, and on the propagation of waves.

Prix et récompenses

AMS Gibbs Lecturer (1981)
CMS Jeffery-Williams Prize (1984)
American Maths Society President (1995 - 1996)
CMS Krieger-Nelson Prize (1997)
United States National Medal of Science (1998)
LMS Honorary Member (2001)
AMS Steele Prize (2004)
AMS/SIAM Birkhoff Prize (2006)

Publications

Problems, including mathematical problems, from my early years
Cathleen Synge Morawetz
created Wed Aug 18 15:53:23 PDT 1999