CATHLEEN SYNGE MORAWETZ

'Cathleen Synge Morawetz' (born May 5, 1923 in Toronto, Canada^[1]) is a mathematician. 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 is Professor Emerita at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at the New York University, where she has also served as director from 1984 to 1988.
Her father, John Lighton Synge was an Irish physicist, specializing in the geometry of general relativity. Her childhood was split between Ireland and Canada. Morawetz graduated from the University of Toronto in 1945 and received her master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D. at New York University, with a thesis on the stability of a spherical implosion.
After graduating, Morawetz got a job at Bell Laboratories where she edited ''Supersonic Flow and Shock Waves'' by Richard Courant and Kurt Friedrichs. She also did contract work for the United States Navy. After the war, she became an American citizen. In 1984, Cathleen Morawetz was appointed director of the Courant Institute, becoming the first woman ever to be director of a mathematics institute in the United States.
Morawetz is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a former president of the American Mathematical Society. In 1998 she was awarded the National Medal of Science. In 1983 and in 1988, she was selected as a Noether Lecturer.
Prof. Morawetz now lives in Greenwich Village, NYC with her husband Herbert Morawetz, a polymer chemist. Their daughter, Nancy Morawetz, is a professor at New York University School of Law and teaches in its Immigrant Rights Clinic.

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1. Morawetz biography

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