Cathleen Synge Morawetz

Cathleen Synge Morawetz (May 5, 1923 – August 8, 2017) was a Canadian mathematician who spent much of her career in the United States. 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.

Childhood Morawetz's father, John Lighton Synge, nephew of John Millington Synge, was an Irish mathematician, specializing in the geometry of general relativity. Her mother also studied mathematics for a time. Her uncle was Edward Hutchinson Synge who is credited as the inventor of the Near-field scanning optical microscope and very large astronomical telescopes, based on multiple mirrors.

Her childhood was split between Ireland and Canada. Both her parents were supportive of her interest in mathematics and science, and it was a woman mathematician, Cecilia Krieger, who had been a family friend for many years and later encouraged Morawetz to pursue a PhD in mathematics. Morawetz said her father was influential in stimulating her interest in mathematics, but he wondered whether her studying mathematics would be wise (suggesting they might fight like the Bernoulli brothers). Her thesis was entitled Contracting Spherical Shocks Treated by a Perturbation Method. This discovery opened up the problem of developing a theory for a flow with shocks. Subsequently, the shocks she predicted mathematically now have been observed in experiments as air flows around the wing of a plane.

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.

At this point her research expanded to a variety of problems including papers on the Tricomi equation and 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.

Honors 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. She was named Outstanding Woman Scientist for 1993 by the Association for Women in Science. 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.

Morawetz was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was the first woman to belong to the Applied Mathematics Section of that organization.

Publications

Personal life Morawetz lived in Greenwich Village with her husband Herbert Morawetz, a polymer chemist. They had four children, eight grandchildren, and three great grandchildren. Their children are Pegeen Rubinstein, John, Lida Jeck, and Nancy Morawetz (a professor at New York University School of Law who manages its Immigrant Rights Clinic).

Upon being honored by the National Organization for Women for successfully combining career and family, Morawetz quipped, "Maybe I became a mathematician because I was so crummy at housework." She said her current non-mathematical interests are "grandchildren and sailing."