About Laurent Schwartz
Laurent-Moïse Schwartz (French: [lɔʁɑ̃ mɔiz ʃvaʁts]; 5 March 1915 – 4 July 2002) was a French mathematician who received the Fields Medal in 1950 for pioneering the theory of distributions or generalized functions, giving a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function. For several years he taught at the École polytechnique. == Family == Laurent Schwartz came from a Jewish family of Alsatian origin, with a strong scientific background: his father was a well-known surgeon, his uncle Robert Debré (who contributed to the creation of UNICEF) was a famous pediatrician, and his great-uncle-in-law, Jacques Hadamard, was a famous mathematician. During his training at Lycée Louis-le-Grand to enter the École Normale Supérieure, he fell in love with mathematician Marie-Hélène Lévy, daughter of the probabilist Paul Lévy who was then teaching at the École polytechnique. They married in 1938. Later they had two children, Marc-André and Claudine Robert, who became a professor of statistics at the University of Grenoble. Marie-Hélène was gifted in mathematics as well, contributing to the development of geometry of singular analytic spaces. She also taught at the University of Lille. Angelo Guerraggio describes "Mathematics, politics and butterflies" as Schwartz's "three great loves". == Education == According to his teachers, Schwartz was an exceptional student.
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