Cathleen Synge Morawetz

Cathleen Synge Morawetz (born May 5, 1923 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada) 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. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1998.

Morawetz's father, John Lighton Synge was an Irish mathematician, specializing in the geometry of general relativity and her mother also studied mathematics for a time. Her uncle was Edward Hutchinson Synge who is credited as the inventor of the Near-field scanning optical microscope. Her childhood was split between Ireland and Canada. Both her parents were supportive of her interest in mathematics and science, and it was a woman mathematician, Cecilia Krieger, who had been a family friend for many years who later encouraged Morawetz to pursue a PhD in mathematics. Morawetz says her father was influential in stimulating her interest in mathematics, but he wondered whether her studying mathematics would be wise (suggesting they might fight like the Bernoulli brothers).

Morawetz graduated from the University of Toronto in 1945 and received her master's degree in 1946 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Morawetz got a job at New York University where she edited Supersonic Flow and Shock Waves by Richard Courant and Kurt Friedrichs. She earned her Ph.D. in 1951 at New York University, with a thesis on the stability of a spherical implosion, under the supervision of Kurt Otto Friedrichs. Her thesis was titled, "Contracting Spherical Shocks Treated by a Perturbation Method." She became an American citizen in 1951.

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