Paulette Libermann

Paulette Libermann (November 14, 1919 – July 10, 2007) was a French mathematician, specializing in differential geometry.
Libermann was one of three sisters born to a family of Russian-Ukrainian Jewish immigrants to Paris. She began her studies in 1938 at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles, a college in Sèvres for training women to become teachers, but was prevented from taking the agrégation and becoming a teacher because of anti-Jewish laws instituted by the German occupation. Instead, she began doing research under the supervision of Élie Cartan. In 1942, she and her family escaped Paris for Lyon, where they hid from the Nazis for two years. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, she returned to Sèvres and completed her studies.
She taught briefly in Douai, and then after two years of study with J. H. C. Whitehead at Oxford University she returned to a teaching position in Strasbourg. But at the encouragement of Cartan she continued her research, publishing her first paper in 1949, leaving her school for a research position at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in 1951, and completing a doctoral thesis in symplectic geometry in 1953 under the supervision of Charles Ehresmann. She obtained a faculty position at the University of Rennes, and moved to the University of Paris in 1966. When the university split in 1968, she moved to Paris Diderot University, from which she retired in 1986.