Léon Rosenfeld | |
---|---|
Born | 14 August 1904
Charleroi, Belgium |
Died | March 23, 1974 | (aged 69)
Citizenship | Belgium |
Alma mater | University of Liège (PhD, 1926) |
Known for | Belinfante–Rosenfeld stress–energy tensor, coined the term lepton |
Spouse | Yvonne Cambresier |
Children | Andrée, Jean |
Awards | Francqui Prize (1949) |
Signature | |
Léon Rosenfeld (French: [ʁɔzɛnfɛld]; 14 August 1904 in Charleroi – 23 March 1974 [1]) was a Belgian physicist and Marxist.
Rosenfeld was born into a secular Jewish family. He was a polyglot who knew eight or nine languages and was fluent in at least five of them. [2]
Rosenfeld obtained a PhD at the University of Liège in 1926, and he was a close collaborator of the physicist Niels Bohr. Rosenfeld published in 1930 the first systematic Hamiltonian approach to Lagrangian models that possess a local gauge symmetry, which predates by two decades the work by Paul Dirac and Peter Bergmann. [3] Rosenfeld contributed to a wide range of physics fields, from statistical physics and quantum field theory to astrophysics. [2] Along with Frederik Belinfante, he derived the Belinfante–Rosenfeld stress–energy tensor. He also founded the journal Nuclear Physics and coined the term lepton. [4]
In 1933, Rosenfeld married Yvonne Cambresier, who was one of the first women to obtain a Physics PhD from a European university. They had a daughter, Andrée Rosenfeld (1934–2008) and a son, Jean Rosenfeld. [5]
Rosenfeld held chairs at multiple universities: Liège, Utrecht, Manchester, and Copenhagen. [2]
In 1949 Léon Rosenfeld was awarded the Francqui Prize for Exact Sciences. [2]
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