Mathematical Legacy
In 1950, Schwartz was awarded the Fields medal for his work on distributions. He was the first French mathematician to receive the Fields medal. Schwartz encountered serious problems trying to enter the United States to receive his medal, because of his sympathy for Trotskyism but was ultimately successful.
The theory of distributions clarifies the (then) mysteries of the Dirac Delta function and Heaviside step function. It helps to extend the theory of Fourier transform and is now of capital importance to the theory of partial differential equations.
Read more about this topic: Laurent Schwartz
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