Marie-Hélène Schwartz

Marie-Hélène Schwartz (, 27 October 1913 – 5 January 2013) was a French mathematician, known for her work on characteristic numbers of spaces with singularities. The Schwartz–MacPherson characteristic classes are named after her.

Early life, education and marriage Marie-Hélène Lévy was born in Paris on 27 October 1913 to Suzanne Lévy (1892-1973) and mathematician Paul Lévy. Her maternal great-grandfather was philologist Henri Weil. She had two younger siblings, Denise Piron (b. 1916) who became a professor of German at the lycée Molière and Jean Claude (b. 1918) who became a naval engineer. She was sent for treatment in the Mont-Blanc sanatorium on the plateau d'Assy in Haute-Savoie where her doctor was Jacques Arnaud. He described her will to recover as "like a dragon". Her condition was considered dangerous and she was warned that marriage and children could cause a relapse. There Marie-Hélène met Henri Cartan and sought his advice on restarting her academic career. He suggested the couple move to study at the University of Strasbourg which operated in Clermont-Ferrand following the Fall of France and German occupation. Schwartz resumed her research there and was able to publish her first paper.

Career

In autumn 1944, with the fall of the Vichy regime, Marie-Hélène and Laurent Schwartz moved back to Paris, and later to Grenoble and Nancy. She finished a thesis on generalisations of the Gauss–Bonnet formula in 1953. Her thesis was published in 1954 in two papers: the first two chapters as Formules apparentées à la formule de Gauss-Bonnet pour certaines applications d'une variété à n dimensions dans une autre, and the third chapter as Formules apparentées à celles de Nevanlinna-Ahlfors pour certaines applications d'une variété à n dimensions dans une autre. Additionally, the Chern–Schwartz–MacPherson classes are a generalization of their work.

Marie-Hélène Schwartz then taught at the University of Paris and the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne. and a day of lectures in Paris honoured her 80th birthday in 1993, during which she presented a two-hour talk herself. She continued publishing mathematical research into her late 80s.

Selected publications