Cécile DeWitt-Morette

Born on 21 December 1922 in Paris, Cécile DeWitt-Morette was an influential mathematical physicist who founded a leading school of theoretical physics. She attended the University of Caen in Normandy, France, where her family lived, and then studied physics at the University of Paris. Morette was in Paris for an exam on 6 June 1944 when bombs from the Allies’ D-Day invasion killed her mother, sister, and grandmother. She earned her doctoral degree in 1947 and worked at France’s National Center for Science Research, during which time she traveled to Ireland, Denmark, and the US to learn from and work with the world’s leading physicists. In 1951 she founded a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps so that French students could learn about the physics breakthroughs that had taken place during and after the war. DeWitt-Morette (she married physicist Bryce DeWitt in 1951) led the summer school for two decades. Alumni of that school, now called the Les Houches School of Physics, include more than two dozen Nobel laureates . DeWitt-Morette also published influential papers about topology and path integrals. She died in May 2017 at age 94. She led a very eventful life, as Physics Today editor Toni Feder shared in a retrospective . (Photo credit: Chris DeWitt)

Date in History: 21 December 1922