Paulette Libermann

Paulette Libermann (14 November 1919 – 10 July 2007) was a French mathematician, specializing in differential geometry.[1][2][3][4]

Early life and education

Libermann was one of three sisters born to a family of Russian-Ukrainian Jewish immigrants to Paris. She began her studies in 1938 at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles, a college in Sèvres for training women to become teachers, but was prevented from taking the agrégation and becoming a teacher because of anti-Jewish laws instituted by the German occupation. Instead, she began doing research under the supervision of Élie Cartan. In 1942, she and her family escaped Paris for Lyon, where they hid from the Nazis for two years. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, she returned to Sèvres and completed her studies.[1][2][3]

Career

She taught briefly in Douai, and then after two years of study with J. H. C. Whitehead at Oxford University she returned to a teaching position in Strasbourg. But at the encouragement of Cartan she continued her research, publishing her first paper in 1949, leaving her school for a research position at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in 1951, and completing a doctoral thesis in symplectic geometry in 1953 under the supervision of Charles Ehresmann. She obtained a faculty position at the University of Rennes, and moved to the University of Paris in 1966. When the university split in 1968, she moved to Paris Diderot University, from which she retired in 1986.[1][2][3][5]

References
  1. Riddle, Larry, "Paulette Libermann", Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College, retrieved 2015-05-16.
  2. Kosmann-Schwarzbach, Yvette (2015), "Women mathematicians in France in the mid-twentieth century", BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, 30 (3): 227–242, arXiv:1502.07597, Bibcode:2015arXiv150207597K, doi:10.1080/17498430.2014.976804.
  3. O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Paulette Libermann", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
  4. Chaperon, Marc (November 8, 2009), Souvenirs de Paulette Libermann: Un portrait mathématique de Paulette Libermann (1919-2007) (in French), CNRS.
  5. Paulette Libermann at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
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