Two Pioneering IHES Scientists Will Soon Be Featured on the Eiffel Tower

IHES is delighted to announce that Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat and Cécile DeWitt-Morette will soon be among the women scientists honored on the Eiffel Tower, an initiative by the Femmes & Sciences association to highlight the contributions of women to science.

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, a distinguished mathematician and physicist, is renowned for her work on Einstein’s equations and their solutions. She became the first woman elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1979, contributed to several authoritative reference works, and mentored generations of researchers. Invited to IHES by Thibault Damour late in her career, she found there a stimulating environment for scientific reflection and exchange.

Cécile DeWitt-Morette played a pivotal role in the founding of IHES by connecting its founder, Léon Motchane, with Robert Oppenheimer, then director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. She served as an administrator at IHES from 1996 to 2014 and founded Les Houches School of Physics in 1951, a world-renowned physics school she led for over 20 years. More than sixty former participants of the Les Houches School of Physics are now Nobel Prize or Fields Medal laureates.

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat and Cécile DeWitt-Morette were lifelong friends and scientific collaborators, and together they helped further elevate the Institute’s standing within the global scientific community.

In 2025, IHES paid tribute to these two trailblazing scientists by inaugurating a garden pavilion in their honor—a lasting symbol of their enduring impact on the Institute and the broader scientific world.

Photo Credit : Jean-François Dars