Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat

French mathematician and physicist who made seminal contributions to the study of general relativity, by showing that the Einstein field equations can be put into the form of an initial value problem which is well-posed. In 2015, her breakthrough paper was listed by the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity as one of thirteen 'milestone' results in the study of general relativity, across the hundred years in which it had been studied. Choquet-Bruhat was the first woman to be elected to the French Academy of Sciences and was a Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur.

Her mother was the philosophy professor Berthe Hubert and her father was the physicist Georges Bruhat, who died in 1945 in the concentration camp Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen. Her brother François Bruhat also became a mathematician, making notable contributions to the study of algebraic groups.

In 1947, she married fellow mathematician Léonce Fourès. Their daughter Michelle is (as of 2016) an ecologist. Her doctoral work and early research is under the name Yvonne Fourès-Bruhat. In 1960, Bruhat and Fourès divorced, she later married the mathematician Gustave Choquet and changed her last name to Choquet-Bruhat. She and Choquet had two children; her son, Daniel Choquet, is a neuroscientist and her daughter, Geneviève, is a doctor.

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat died on 11 February 2025 at the age of 101.