The Most Famous
PHYSICISTS from Belgium
This page contains a list of the greatest Belgian Physicists. The pantheon dataset contains 851 Physicists, 6 of which were born in Belgium. This makes Belgium the birth place of the 20th most number of Physicists behind China, and Ireland.
Top 7
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Belgian Physicists of all time. This list of famous Belgian Physicists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. Georges Lemaître (1894 - 1966)
With an HPI of 70.66, Georges Lemaître is the most famous Belgian Physicist. His biography has been translated into 71 different languages on wikipedia.
Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître ( lə-MET-rə; French: [ʒɔʁʒ ləmɛːtʁ] ; 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Catholic priest, theoretical physicist, and mathematician who made major contributions to cosmology and astrophysics. He was the first to argue that the recession of galaxies is evidence of an expanding universe and to connect the observational Hubble–Lemaître law with the solution to the Einstein field equations in the general theory of relativity for a homogenous and isotropic universe. That work led Lemaître to propose what he called the "hypothesis of the primeval atom", now regarded as the first formulation of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Lemaître studied engineering, mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain and was ordained as a priest of the Archdiocese of Mechelen in 1923. His ecclesiastical superior and mentor, Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, encouraged and supported his scientific work, allowing Lemaître to travel to England, where he worked with the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington at the University of Cambridge in 1923–1924, and to the United States, where he worked with Harlow Shapley at the Harvard College Observatory and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1924–1925. Lemaître was a professor of physics at Louvain from 1927 until his retirement in 1964. A pioneer in the use of computers in physics research, in the 1930s he showed, with Manuel Sandoval Vallarta of MIT, that cosmic rays are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field and must therefore carry electric charge. In 1960, Pope John XXIII appointed him Domestic Prelate, entitling him to be addressed as "Monsignor". In that same year he became president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a post that he occupied until his death.
2. François Englert (b. 1932)
With an HPI of 67.41, François Englert is the 2nd most famous Belgian Physicist. His biography has been translated into 69 different languages.
François, Baron Englert (French: [ɑ̃ɡlɛʁ]; born 6 November 1932) is a Belgian theoretical physicist and 2013 Nobel Prize laureate. Englert is professor emeritus at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where he is a member of the Service de Physique Théorique. He is also a Sackler Professor by Special Appointment in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University and a member of the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University in California. He was awarded the 2010 J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics (with Gerry Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, Tom Kibble, Peter Higgs, and Robert Brout), the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2004 (with Brout and Higgs) and the High Energy and Particle Prize of the European Physical Society (with Brout and Higgs) in 1997 for the mechanism which unifies short and long range interactions by generating massive gauge vector bosons. Englert has made contributions in statistical physics, quantum field theory, cosmology, string theory and supergravity. He is the recipient of the 2013 Prince of Asturias Award in technical and scientific research, together with Peter Higgs and the CERN. Englert was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Peter Higgs for the discovery of the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism.
3. Joseph Plateau (1801 - 1883)
With an HPI of 63.16, Joseph Plateau is the 3rd most famous Belgian Physicist. His biography has been translated into 40 different languages.
Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (French pronunciation: [ʒozɛf ɑ̃twan fɛʁdinɑ̃ plato]; 14 October 1801 – 15 September 1883) was a Belgian physicist and mathematician. He was one of the first people to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. To do this, he used counterrotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the phenakistiscope.
4. Théophile de Donder (1872 - 1957)
With an HPI of 52.57, Théophile de Donder is the 4th most famous Belgian Physicist. His biography has been translated into 20 different languages.
Théophile Ernest de Donder (French: [də dɔ̃dɛʁ]; 19 August 1872 – 11 May 1957) was a Belgian mathematician, physicist and chemist famous for his work (published in 1923) in developing correlations between the Newtonian concept of chemical affinity and the Gibbsian concept of free energy.
5. Étienne-Gaspard Robert (1763 - 1837)
With an HPI of 49.42, Étienne-Gaspard Robert is the 5th most famous Belgian Physicist. His biography has been translated into 17 different languages.
Étienne-Gaspard Robert (15 June 1763 – 2 July 1837), often known by the stage name of "Robertson", was a prominent physicist, stage magician and influential developer of phantasmagoria from the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. He was described by Charles Dickens as "an honourable and well-educated showman". Alongside his pioneering work on projection techniques for his shows Robert was also a physics lecturer and a keen balloonist at a time of great development in aviation.
6. Léon Rosenfeld (1904 - 1974)
With an HPI of 42.06, Léon Rosenfeld is the 6th most famous Belgian Physicist. His biography has been translated into 16 different languages.
Léon Rosenfeld (French: [ʁɔzɛnfɛld]; 14 August 1904 in Charleroi – 23 March 1974) was a Belgian physicist and a communist activist. 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. Rosenfeld obtained a PhD at the University of Liège in 1926, and he was a close collaborator of the physicist Niels Bohr from 1930 until Bohr's death in 1962. 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. 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. 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.
7. Conny Aerts (b. 1966)
With an HPI of 34.05, Conny Aerts is the 7th most famous Belgian Physicist. Her biography has been translated into 15 different languages.
Conny Clara Aerts, born 26 January 1966, is a Belgian (Flemish) professor in astrophysics. She specialises in asteroseismology. She is associated with KU Leuven and Radboud University, where she leads the Chair in the Astroseismology group. In 2012, she became the first woman to be awarded the Francqui Prize in the category of Science & Technology. In 2022, she became the third woman to be awarded the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics for her work in asteroseismology.
People
Pantheon has 7 people classified as Belgian physicists born between 1763 and 1966. Of these 7, 2 (28.57%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living Belgian physicists include François Englert, and Conny Aerts. The most famous deceased Belgian physicists include Georges Lemaître, Joseph Plateau, and Théophile de Donder. As of April 2024, 1 new Belgian physicists have been added to Pantheon including Conny Aerts.
Living Belgian Physicists
Go to all RankingsDeceased Belgian Physicists
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Georges Lemaître
1894 - 1966
HPI: 70.66
Joseph Plateau
1801 - 1883
HPI: 63.16
Théophile de Donder
1872 - 1957
HPI: 52.57
Étienne-Gaspard Robert
1763 - 1837
HPI: 49.42
Léon Rosenfeld
1904 - 1974
HPI: 42.06
Newly Added Belgian Physicists (2024)
Go to all RankingsOverlapping Lives
Which Physicists were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 5 most globally memorable Physicists since 1700.
