Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat is a French mathematician and physicist. She has made seminal contributions to the study of Einstein's general theory of relativity, by showing that the Einstein equations can be put into the form of an initial value problem which is well-posed. In 2015, her breakthrough paper was listed by the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity as one of thirteen 'milestone' results in the study of general relativity, across the hundred years in which it had been studied.

She was the first woman to be elected to the French Academy of Sciences and is a Grand Officier of the Légion d'honneur. Yvonne Bruhat was born in Lille in 1923. Her mother was the philosophy professor Berthe Hubert and her father was the physicist Georges Bruhat, who died in 1945 in the concentration camp Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen. Her brother François Bruhat also became a mathematician, making notable contributions to the study of algebraic groups.

Bruhat undertook her secondary school education in Paris. In 1941 she entered the prestigious Concours Général national competition, winning the silver medal for physics. From 1943 to 1946 she studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and from 1946 was a teaching assistant there and undertook research advised by André Lichnerowicz.

From 1949 to 1951 she was a research assistant at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, as a result of which she received her doctorate. In 1951, she became a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Her supervisor, Jean Leray, suggested that she study the dynamics of the Einstein field equations. He also introduced her to Albert Einstein, whom she consulted with a few times further during her time at the Institute. 

In 1952, Bruhat and her husband were both offered jobs at Marseilles, precipitating her early departure from the Institute. In the same year, she published the local existence and uniqueness of solutions to the vacuum Einstein Equations, her most renowned achievement. Her work proves the well-posedness of the Einstein equations, and started the study of dynamics in General Relativity.

In 1947, she married fellow mathematician Léonce Fourès. Their daughter Michelle is now (as of 2016) an ecologist. Her doctoral work and early research is under the name Yvonne Fourès-Bruhat. In 1960, Bruhat and Fourès divorced, with her later marrying the mathematician Gustave Choquet and changing her last name to Choquet-Bruhat. She and Choquet had two children; her son, Daniel Choquet, is a neuroscientist and her daughter, Geneviève, is a doctor.