From Wartime Devastation To Academic Discrimination, Cécile DeWitt-Morette Overcame It All

Physicist Paul Halpern honors the life and work of Cécile DeWitt-Morette, former Member in the School of Mathematics/Natural Sciences, who died on May 8 at the age of 94, writing:

Starting with the bombing of her family’s house in World War II that resulted in the tragic deaths of her mother, sister, and grandmother, life was never easy for her. Nor were her choices ever simple. She faced decades of discrimination for being a woman in a male dominated field and, later in life, the challenges of dealing with her husband's death from pancreatic cancer, one of her daughter’s struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the hardships of old age. Yet she endured and flourished, carving out enough time for her many hobbies and intellectual pursuits until the very end.