She 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.

[3] 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.

From 1943 to 1946 she studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, and from 1946 was a teaching assistant there and undertook research advised by André Lichnerowicz.

At the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie she continued to make significant contributions to mathematical physics, notably in general relativity, supergravity, and the non-Abelian gauge theories of the standard model.

Her work in 1981 with Demetrios Christodoulou showed the existence of global solutions of the Yang–Mills, Higgs, and spinor field equations in 3+1 Dimensions.

In this sense, an initial data set can be viewed as the prescription of the submanifold geometry of an embedded spacelike hypersurface in a Lorentzian manifold.

Choquet-Bruhat also proved a uniqueness theorem: Given any two globally hyperbolic vacuum developments f1 : M → (M1, g1) and f2 : M → (M2, g2) of the same vacuum initial data set, there is an open subset U1 of M1 containing f1(M) and an open subset U2 of M2 containing f1(M), together with an isometry i : (U1, g1) → (U2, g2) such that i(f1(p)) = f2(p) for all p in M.In a slightly imprecise form, this says: given any embedded spacelike hypersurface M of a Ricci-flat Lorentzian manifold M, the geometry of M near M is fully determined by the submanifold geometry of M. In an article written with Robert Geroch in 1969, Choquet-Bruhat fully clarified the nature of uniqueness.

For instance, the well-known theorem of Demetrios Christodoulou and Sergiu Klainerman on stability of Minkowski space asserts that if (ℝ3, g, k) is a vacuum initial data set with g and k sufficiently close to zero (in a certain precise form), then its maximal globally hyperbolic vacuum development is geodesically complete and geometrically close to Minkowski space.