Jean Marie Souriau

Jean-Marie (Papy) Souriau (Paris, June 3, 1922 – March 15, 2012) was a French mathematician and physicist. He was known for his work on symplectic geometry, of which he is one of the pioneers. He has published several works, including a treatise on relativity (Sou64b) and a treatise on mechanics (Sou70). He essentially developed the symplectic aspect of classical and quantum mechanics: as the first geometric interpretation of spin and many important notions today, such as the coadjoint action of a group on its momentum space, moment mapping, prequantization (geometric quantization), the classification of homogeneous symplectic varieties, dipheological spaces and many others.