Laurent-Moïse Schwartz (5 March 1915 in Paris – 4 July 2002 in Paris) was a French mathematician. Alumnus of the École normale supérieure, he was awarded the Fields medal in 1950 for his works on the theory of distributions, which gives a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function. For a long time he taught at the École polytechnique.
Apart from his scientific work, he was a well-known outspoken intellectual, leaning towards...
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Laurent-Moïse Schwartz (5 March 1915 in Paris – 4 July 2002 in Paris) was a French mathematician. Alumnus of the École normale supérieure, he was awarded the Fields medal in 1950 for his works on the theory of distributions, which gives a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function. For a long time he taught at the École polytechnique.
Apart from his scientific work, he was a well-known outspoken intellectual, leaning towards socialism.
Laurent Schwartz comes from a Jewish family of Alsatian origin, with a strong scientific background: his father is a well-known surgeon, his uncle Robert Debré (who contributed to the creation of UNICEF) is a famous pediatrician, and his great-uncle-in-law, Jacques Hadamard, is a famous mathematician.
During his training at Lycée Louis-le-Grand to enter the École normale supérieure, he falls in love with Marie-Hélène Lévy, daughter of the probabilist Paul Lévy who was then teaching at École polytechnique. Later they would have two...
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