Cathleen Synge Morawetz - Career

Career

After earning her doctorate, Morawetz spent a year as a research associate at MIT before returning to work as a research associate at Courant Institute for five more years. During this time she had no teaching requirements and could focus purely on research. She published work on a variety of topics in applied mathematics including viscocity, compressible fluids and transonic flows. Turning to the mathematics of transonic flow, she showed that specially designed shockless airfoils develop shocks if they are perturbed even by a small amount. This discovery opened up the problem of developing a theory for a flow with shocks. Subsequently the shocks she predicted mathematically have been experimentally observed as air flows around the wing of a plane

In 1957 she became an assistant professor at Courant. At this point she began to work more closely with her colleagues publishing important joint papers with Peter Lax and Ralph Phillips on the decay of solutions to the wave equation around a star shaped obstacle. She continued with important solo work on the wave equation and transonic flow around a profile until she was promoted to full professor by 1965. At this point her research expanded to a variety of problems including papers on the Tricomi equation the nonrelatavistic wave equation including questions of decay and scattering. Her first doctoral student, Lesley Sibner, graduated in 1964. In the 1970s she worked on questions of scattering theory and the nonlinear wave equation.