Jean-Marie Souriau

Jean-Marie Souriau
Born	(1922-06-03)3 June 1922
Died
Nationality	French
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Provence
Alma mater	ONERA École Normale Supérieure
Doctoral advisor	Joseph Pérès André Lichnerowicz
Doctoral students	Paul Donato Christian Duval Jimmy Elhadad Henry-Hugues Fliche Péter Horváthy Patrick Iglesias‑Zemmour Roland Triay François Ziegler

Jean-Marie Souriau (3 June 1922 – 15 March 2012) was a French mathematician, known for works in symplectic geometry, in which he was one of the pioneers. He published several works, a treatise on calculus [Sou64a], a treatise on relativity [Sou64b] and a treatise on symplectic mechanics [Sou70]. He developed the symplectic aspects of classical and quantum mechanics. He contributed to the introduction or the development of many important concepts, such as the coadjoint action and the coadjoint orbits of a group on its moment space, which led in particular to the first geometric interpretation of spin at a classical level. He introduced the moment map, he suggested a program of geometric quantization, he gave a classification of the homogeneous symplectic manifolds, known as the Kirillov-Kostant-Souriau theorem. Finally, he proposed a new approach to differential geometry by means of diffeological spaces.

He was educated at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and spent most of his career as a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Provence in Marseille.

Bibliography

• [Sou64a] J.-M. Souriau, Calcul linéaire, P.U.F., Paris, 1964.
• [Sou64b] J.-M. Souriau, Géométrie et relativité, Hermann, 1964.
• [Sou70] J.-M. Souriau, Structure des systèmes dynamiques, Dunod, Paris, 1970.
• [Sou97] J.-M. Souriau, Structure of Dynamical Systems, Birkhäuser, Boston, 1997.

External links

• Jean-Marie Souriau official website (the website hosts copies of many of Souriau's works)
• Review by Mark Roberts of Sou97
• Ray F. Streater: Souriau
• Patrick Iglesias-Zemmour: Souriau
• Photo: photo
• In Memoriam Conference 2012: Web site