Name Leon Rosenfeld Role Physicist | Education University of Liege | |
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Books Selected Papers of Leon Rosenfeld, The Macroscopic Level of Quantum Mechanics, Niels Bohr, Collected Works | ||
Léon Rosenfeld (14 August 1904 in Charleroi – 23 March 1974) was a Belgian physicist. He obtained a PhD at the University of Liège in 1926, and he was a close collaborator of the physicist Niels Bohr. He did early work in quantum electrodynamics that predates by two decades the work by Dirac and Bergmann. Rosenfeld contributed to a wide range of physics fields, from statistical physics and quantum field theory to astrophysics. Along with Frederik Belinfante, he derived the Belinfante-Rosenfeld stress-energy tensor. He also founded the journal Nuclear Physics and coined the term lepton.
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Awards and honors
Rosenfeld held chairs at multiple universities: Liège, Utrecht, Manchester, and Copenhagen.
In 1949 Léon Rosenfeld was awarded the Francqui Prize for Exact Sciences.
Personal life
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.
In 1933, Rosenfeld married Dr. Yvonne Cambresier, who was one of the first women to obtain a Physics Ph.D from a European university. They had a daughter, Andrée Rosenfeld (1934-2008) and a son, Jean Rosenfeld.