Celebratio Mathematica

We close this art­icle with a quote by Cath­leen Synge Mor­awetz. Upon re­ceiv­ing the Birk­hoff Prize in 2006, she said:

There are many, many people whom I would have liked to thank for help­ing me over the years, but I would not have room for their names on this page. But one per­son stands out for sup­port­ing and en­cour­aging me when I was between the cru­cial pro­fes­sion­al ages of twenty-three and thirty-five. I worked part-time on my PhD, part-time as a postdoc, and I had four chil­dren. That per­son was Richard Cour­ant, the cre­at­or of the Cour­ant In­sti­tute at New York Uni­versity, where I have been a pro­fess­or ever since.

It is truly rare for any de­part­ment to sup­port a wo­man’s ca­reer in this way: with part-time re­search-as­so­ci­ate po­s­i­tions and a long-term com­mit­ment that does not re­quire the wo­man to re­lo­cate every few years to even­tu­ally ob­tain a ten­ure track po­s­i­tion. Many wo­men leave aca­demia after com­plet­ing their doc­tor­ates, switch­ing to jobs in in­dustry, while oth­ers land in teach­ing po­s­i­tions and nev­er have the op­por­tun­ity to de­vel­op a re­search ca­reer. It is a great loss of tal­ent. Ima­gine a world in which Mor­awetz had nev­er de­veloped her para­mount res­ults on tran­son­ic flow mod­els, func­tion­al in­equal­it­ies and scat­ter­ing the­ory. Ima­gine a world in which more wo­men’s re­search were sup­por­ted as well as hers was. It would be a bet­ter place.

We would like to thank Cath­leen Mor­awetz’s son, John, and also the head of the Cour­ant In­sti­tute Lib­rary, Car­ol Hutchins, for find­ing many won­der­ful pho­tos and re­search­ing their dates and loc­a­tions. We re­gret that we could only in­clude a few here. We would also like to thank Penelope Chang for vo­lun­teer­ing as an artist for the AMS No­tices.