![]() The enduring love of Laurent Schwartz for probability theory developed through his personal contact with his future father-in-law, Paul Lévy. At the nearby Collège de France in Paris, they could also hear Henri Lebesgue’s lectures and take part in the Hadamard seminar. The ENS students had the privilege of attending the lectures of some the best French mathematicians: Émile Borel, Élie Cartan, Alfred Denjoy, Maurice Fréchet, George Julia, and Paul Montel. But being attracted to geometry as much as to the classics, he applied to and was admitted into the science classes of the École normale supérieure (ENS) of Paris, the most selective and most scholarly oriented of the Grandes écoles, the elite specialized colleges parallel to the universities in the French system of higher education. On completing the lycée (high school), Laurent Schwartz won, in the Latin category, the Concours Général, the most prestigious nationwide competition in France for high schoolers. The eminent mathematician Jacques Hadamard was Laurent’s granduncle. (These had become Catholic converts.) In 1938 Laurent Schwartz married Marie-Hélène Levy, whose father, Paul Levy, is the initiator of modern probability theory Marie-Hélène Schwartz was to become a distinguished mathematician in her own right. (In 1907 he became the first Jewish surgeon ever officially employed in a Paris hospital.) Through his mother, Claire, Laurent was related to the Debrés, a prominent Jewish French family: his maternal grandfather was the chief rabbi in Neuilly later, a Debré would be president of the national Academy of Medicine there have been and still are prominent Gaullist politicians in the Debré family. Life and Career Laurent Schwartz was the first son of Anselme Schwartz, originally an immigrant from Alsatia, at the time under German control, and later a highly successful surgeon. He also introduced the concept of radonifying maps, related to both the geometry of Banach spaces and probability theory. Schwartz is the inventor of distribution theory, now a universally used language of mathematical analysis. ![]() Paris, France, 4 July 2002), mathematics, analysis, probability theory.
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