Édith Mourier

Édith Mourier (21 December 1920 - 19 December 2017)^[1] was a French mathematician, specialising in probability theory. She is particularly known for the Fortet-Mourier distance, which is used to quantify the difference between two measurements.^[2]

Édith Marguerite Pauline Mourier was born on 21 December 1920 in Cherbourg.^[3] She studied mathematics at the Sorbonne.^[2]

After earning her bachelor's degree, she joined the institut Henri-Poincaré where she collaborated with a small group of researchers working on probability theory,^[4] a field of mathematical research which was somewhat neglected in France at the time.^[2]

Mourier became a researcher at Centre national de la recherche scientifique (French National Centre for Scientific Research) (CNRS) in 1945.^[2]

In 1952, Mourier was appointed director of research at CNRS after defending her doctoral thesis on Random elements in a Banach space.^[2] This work generalises the law of large numbers relating to random points to function spaces (Banach spaces), known as the Fortet-Mourier theorem after Mourier and her PhD supervisor and colleague Robert Fortet.^[2] It is known as the Satz von Mourier in Germany.^[5]

After leaving CNRS, Mourier became a professor at the University of Poitiers from 1956 to 1967, then at the University of Paris from 1967 to 1987.^[2]

Édith Mourier died on 19 December 2017 in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.^[3]

• Éléments aléatoires dans un espace de Banach. Vol. 13. Paris: Gauthier-Villars. 1953. p. 161-244. OCLC 1157293879..
• "Influence d'une erreur sur la covariance dans le problème de la détection d'un signal certain dans un bruit laplacien centré". Annales Des Télécommunications (in French). 31 (3): 108–110. 1976-03-01. doi:10.1007/BF02997592. ISSN 1958-9395..
• "Random elements in linear spaces". Berkeley Symp. on Math. Statist. and Prob. 5.2A: 43-53. 1967..
• "Le bruit blanc". Annales des Télécommunications (in French). 19 (7): 169–172. 1964-07-01. doi:10.1007/BF03021654. ISSN 1958-9395..

In 2026, Édith Mourier was announced as one of 72 historical women in STEM whose names have been proposed to be added to the 72 men already celebrated on the Eiffel Tower. The plan was announced by the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo following the recommendations of a committee led by Isabelle Vauglin of Femmes et Sciences and Jean-François Martins, representing the operating company which runs the Eiffel Tower.^{[6][7][8][9][10][5]}