Israel Halperin (1911-2007) was a Canadian mathematician and professor emeritus of the University of Toronto, as well as a social activist. Laurent Schwartz (1915-2002) was was a French mathematician. He pioneered the theory of distributions, which gives a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1950 for his work on the theory of distributions. For several years he taught at the École polytechnique.

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