Maurice Marc Lévy (7 September 1922 – 13 April 2022) was a French physicist and teacher. He was president of the

CNES The (CNES; French: ''Centre national d'études spatiales'') is the French government space agency (administratively, a "public administration with industrial and commercial purpose"). Its headquarters are located in central Paris and it is un ...

from 1973 to 1976.

Education

Maurice Lévy obtained his

Baccalauréat The ''baccalauréat'' (; ), often known in France colloquially as the ''bac'', is a French national academic qualification that students can obtain at the completion of their secondary education (at the end of the ''lycée'') by meeting certain ...

at the Lycée Bugeaud in Algiers, and then graduated in mathematics and physics from the

University of Algiers The University of Algiers (Arabic:جامعة الجزائر – بن يوسف بن خـدة ), commonly called the Algiers 1 University, is a public research university located in Algiers, Algeria. It is the oldest and most prestigious univers ...

. He then obtained a graduate degree in optics and entered the

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...

in 1945. He left Algeria for France and joined the Physical Research Laboratory of the Sorbonne ( LRPS), directed by

Jean Cabannes Jean Cabannes (born 12 August 1885 – died 31 October 1959) was a French physicist specialising in optics. Education and career Cabannes studied at the Lycée de Nice and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1906. From 1910 to 1914, C ...

. After a brief stay at the University of Leiden, he defended his thesis in 1949 under the supervision of Jean Cabannes. Louis de Broglie participated in his thesis examination.

Career

In 1949, he visited the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The university owns and operates majo ...

to work under the direction of

Léon Rosenfeld Léon Rosenfeld (; 14 August 1904 in Charleroi – 23 March 1974) 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 the ...

. In 1950, he joined the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ni ...

, directed by

J. Robert Oppenheimer J. Robert Oppenheimer (; April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist. A professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is often ...

. He returned to France in 1952, became senior researcher at the CNRS and worked in the physics department of the

École normale supérieure (Paris) The ''École normale supérieure - PSL'' (; also known as ''ENS'', ''Normale sup, ''Ulm'' or ''ENS Paris'') is a '' grande école'' university in Paris, France. It is one of the constituent members of Paris Sciences et Lettres University (PSL) ...

(ENS), directed by Yves Rocard. He taught quantum mechanics for twelve years to first-year students at the ENS. He was appointed professor at the Bordeaux Faculty of Science in 1953, then at the Paris Faculty of Science in 1954. He participated with Yves Rocard in the creation of the Linear Accelerator Laboratory (LAL). In 1960, he established the physics summer school of

Cargèse Cargèse (; or ; it, Cargese ; el, Καργκέζε, Kargkéze) is a village and '' commune'' in the Corse-du-Sud department of France on the west coast of the island of Corsica, 27 km north of Ajaccio. , the commune had a population ...

in Corsica; eventually, the program grew to the Institut d'Études Scientifiques de Cargèse. He was a professor at the

Pierre and Marie Curie University Pierre and Marie Curie University (french: link=no, Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, UPMC), also known as Paris 6, was a public research university in Paris, France, from 1971 to 2017. The university was located on the Jussieu Campus in the ...

right from its foundation in 1971, and a researcher at the Laboratory of Theoretical and High Energy Physics (LPTHE), collaborating in particular with Jean-Louis Basdevant and with

John Iliopoulos John (Jean) Iliopoulos (Greek: Ιωάννης Ηλιόπουλος; 1940, Kalamata, Greece) is a Greek physicist. He is the first person to present the Standard Model of particle physics in a single report. He is best known for his prediction of ...

Notable research and recognition

In 1960, he co-authored with

Murray Gell-Mann Murray Gell-Mann (; September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical ...

a seminal paper on the

Sigma model In physics, a sigma model is a field theory that describes the field as a point particle confined to move on a fixed manifold. This manifold can be taken to be any Riemannian manifold, although it is most commonly taken to be either a Lie group or ...

, which served as a cynosure for

particle physics Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) and ...

in the following decades, providing the modern framework for understanding the weak interactions and their interplay with

chiral symmetry breaking In particle physics, chiral symmetry breaking is the spontaneous symmetry breaking of a chiral symmetry – usually by a gauge theory such as quantum chromodynamics, the quantum field theory of the strong interaction. Yoichiro Nambu was award ...

by the strong interactions. He was made Commandeur of the Légion d'honneur on 13 July 1993.https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000000544382

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Levy, Maurice 1922 births 2022 deaths 20th-century French physicists 21st-century French physicists University of Algiers alumni University of Paris alumni French National Centre for Scientific Research scientists Academic staff of the University of Bordeaux Academic staff of Pierre and Marie Curie University Commandeurs of the Légion d'honneur People from Tlemcen