Cathleen Synge Morawetz

At this point her research expanded to a variety of problems including papers on the Tricomi equation the nonrelativistic wave equation including questions of decay and scattering. Her first doctoral student, Lesley Sibner, was graduated in 1964. In the 1970s she worked on questions of scattering theory and the nonlinear wave equation. She proved what is now known as the Morawetz Inequality. She died on August 8, 2017, in New York City.

In 1980 Morawetz won a Lester R. Ford Award. In 1981, she became the first woman to deliver the Gibbs Lecture of The American Mathematical Society, and in 1982 presented an Invited Address at a meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She received honorary degrees from Eastern Michigan University in 1980, Brown University, and Smith College in 1982, and Princeton in 1990. In 1983 and in 1988, she was selected as a Noether Lecturer. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984. She was named Outstanding Woman Scientist for 1993 by the Association for Women in Science. In 1995, she became the second woman elected to the office of president of the American Mathematical Society. In 1996, she was awarded an honorary ScD degree by Trinity College Dublin, where her father JL Synge had been a student and later a faculty member. That same year, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. In 1998 she was awarded the National Medal of Science; she was the first woman to receive the medal for work in mathematics. In 2004 she received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. In 2006 she won the George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics. In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

In 1957 she became an assistant professor at Courant. At this point she began to work more closely with her colleagues publishing important joint papers with Peter Lax and Ralph Phillips on the decay of solutions to the wave equation around a star shaped obstacle. She continued with important solo work on the wave equation and transonic flow around a profile until she was promoted to full professor by 1965.

A graduate of the University of Toronto in 1945, Morawetz received her master’s degree in 1946 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Morawetz got a job at New York University where she edited Supersonic Flow and Shock Waves by Richard Courant and Kurt Otto Friedrichs. She earned her Ph.D. in 1951 at New York University, with a thesis on the stability of a spherical implosion, under the supervision of Kurt Otto Friedrichs. Her thesis was entitled Contracting Spherical Shocks Treated by a Perturbation Method

Cathleen Synge Morawetz (May 5, 1923 – August 8, 2017) was a Canadian mathematician who spent much of her career in the United States. Morawetz’s research was mainly in the study of the partial differential equations governing fluid flow, particularly those of mixed type occurring in transonic flow. She was professor emerita at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at the New York University, where she had also served as director from 1984 to 1988. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1998.