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Concept
Laurent Schwartz
Summary
Laurent-Moïse Schwartz (ʃvaʁts; 5 March 1915 – 4 July 2002) was a French mathematician. He pioneered the theory of distributions, which gives a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1950 for his work on the theory of distributions. For several years he taught at the École polytechnique.
Laurent Schwartz came from a Jewish family of Alsatian origin, with a strong scientific background: his father was a well-known surgeon, his uncle Robert Debré (who contributed to the creation of UNICEF) was a famous pediatrician, and his great-uncle-in-law, Jacques Hadamard, was a famous mathematician.
During his training at Lycée Louis-le-Grand to enter the École Normale Supérieure, he fell in love with Marie-Hélène Lévy, daughter of the probabilist Paul Lévy who was then teaching at the École polytechnique. They married in 1938. Later they had two children, Marc-André and Claudine. Marie-Hélène was gifted in mathematics as well, as she contributed to the geometry of singular analytic spaces and taught at the University of Lille.
Angelo Guerraggio describes "Mathematics, politics and butterflies" as his "three great loves".
According to his teachers, Schwartz was an exceptional student. He was particularly gifted in Latin, Greek and mathematics. One of his teachers told his parents: "Beware, some will say your son has a gift for languages, but he is only interested in the scientific and mathematical aspect of languages: he should become a mathematician."
In 1934, he was admitted at the École Normale Supérieure, and in 1937 he obtained the agrégation (with rank 2).
As a man of Trotskyist affinities and Jewish descent, life was difficult for Schwartz during World War II. He had to hide and change his identity to avoid being deported after Nazi Germany overran France.
Official source
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