Lesley Sibner

Lesley Millman Sibner (August 13, 1934 – September 11, 2013) was an American mathematician and professor of mathematics at Polytechnic Institute of New York University. She earned her Bachelors at City College CUNY in Mathematics. She completed her doctorate at Courant Institute NYU in 1964 under the joint supervision of Lipman Bers and Cathleen Morawetz. Her thesis concerned partial differential equations of mixed-type.

Research career In 1964, Lesley Sibner became an instructor at Stanford University for two years. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris the following year. At this time, in addition to solo work on the Tricomi equation and compressible flows, she began working with her husband Robert Sibner on a problem suggested by Lipman Bers: do there exists compressible flows on a Riemann surface? As part of her work in this direction, she studied differential geometry and Hodge theory eventually proving a nonlinear Hodge–DeRham theorem with Robert Sibner based on a physical interpretation of one-dimensional harmonic forms on closed manifolds. The techniques are related to her prior work on compressible flows. They kept working together on related problems and applications of this important work for many years.

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