Léon Van Hove

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Van Hove in an interview at CERN in March 1976

Léon Charles Prudent Van Hove (* 1924 in Brussels ; † September 2, 1990 ) was a Belgian theoretical physicist . His research interests developed from mathematics to solid state physics to nuclear physics and elementary particle physics as well as to cosmology .

Life

Van Hove studied mathematics and physics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). In 1946 he received his doctorate in mathematics from the ULB. From 1949/1950 and 1952 to 1954 he worked at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study , where he met Robert Oppenheimer . He later worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory and was Professor and Director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands . In 1959 he became head of the theory department at CERN . After he was Managing Director at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich from 1971 to 1974 , he returned to CERN, where he was Research Director from 1976 to 1980 and stayed until 1982.

In 1958 he received the Francqui Prize . In 1962 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics . In 1971 he received the Nessim Habib Prize from the University of Geneva. In 1974 he received the Max Planck Medal . He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Warsaw (1975), Helsinki (1977), Pavia (1977). Since 1959 he was a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences , since 1960 of the Flemish Academy of Sciences and since 1961 of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences . Since 1974 he was an external member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences . In 1964 he became an honorary member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1975 he was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , in 1980 a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society . He was a member of the American Physical Society .

Martinus Veltman is one of his PhD students .

He was one of the earliest editors of Physics Letters . One of his early successes for the journal was the publication of Murray Gell-Mann's 1964 essay on quarks . In the same year he also played a less notable role in the conflict with George Zweig , who was at CERN at the time and also introduced the Quark concept.

See also

literature

  • Alberto Giovannini (Editor) The legacy of Léon Van Hove , World Scientific, 2000

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Léon Van Hove's membership entry at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on February 29, 2016.
  2. ^ Member History: Leon Van Hove. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 4, 2018 .