SCHWARTZ, LAURENT

SCHWARTZ, LAURENT (1915–2002), French mathematician. Born in Autouillet near Paris, Schwartz received his formative mathematical and political education at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. After military service he eventually completed his mathematical doctoral thesis in 1943 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in Vichy France, temporarily conjoined with the University of Strasbourg. As a Jew with well-known left-wing political views, he was in increasing danger after the Germans occupied the whole of France in November 1942. He took refuge in St. Pierre-de-Paladru, a small hamlet near Grenoble, where his most influential mathematical ideas began to crystallize despite the constant problems of survival. After a one-year appointment at the University of Grenoble (1944), he became professor of mathematics at the University of Nancy (1945–52) before moving to the Sorbonne in 1952. In 1958 he became a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique (1953–83), where in 1966 he founded the Centre de Mathématique. His major work concerned the concept of distributions leading to the Fourier theory of distribution transforms. His work broadened the scope of calculus and brought Paul Dirac's ideas of "delta functions" in   quantum mechanics within the scope of rigorous mathematics. For this work he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1950, the mathematicians' equivalent of the Nobel Prize. He was a brilliant teacher of mathematics for professional and lay audiences and in his sabbaticals did much to establish mathematics teaching in underdeveloped countries. His honors included membership in the Académie des Sciences. He was also an expert on butterflies. Schwartz was a Trotskyist as a student, but he was eventually disillusioned with political affiliation. He became a passionate supporter of individual freedom and rights and an anticolonialist over French policy in Algeria and U.S. policy in the Vietnam war, even though his views provoked temporarily unfavorable reactions from the French and U.S. governments. He maintained that mathematical discovery is rigorous and subversive, principles to be followed in life in general. An atheist, he was nonetheless committed to Jewish rights and an early advocate of organized anti-Nazi Jewish military action. (Michael Denman (2nd ed.)