The Most Famous
PHYSICISTS from Belgium
This page contains a list of the greatest Belgian Physicists. The pantheon dataset contains 717 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 6
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 71.80, Georges Lemaître is the most famous Belgian Physicist. His biography has been translated into 70 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, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was the first to theorize that the recession of nearby galaxies can be explained by an expanding universe, which was observationally confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble. He first derived "Hubble's law", now called the Hubble–Lemaître law by the IAU, and published the first estimation of the Hubble constant in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. Lemaître also proposed the "Big Bang theory" of the origin of the universe, calling it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom", and later calling it "the beginning of the world".
2. François Englert (1932 - )
With an HPI of 65.72, François Englert is the 2nd most famous Belgian Physicist. His biography has been translated into 65 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 60.80, 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. Étienne-Gaspard Robert (1763 - 1837)
With an HPI of 48.98, Étienne-Gaspard Robert is the 4th most famous Belgian Physicist. His biography has been translated into 16 different languages.
Étienne-Gaspard Robert (15 June 1763 – 2 July 1837), often known by the stage name of "Robertson", was a prominent Liégeois (now part of Belgium) physicist, stage magician and influential developer of phantasmagoria. 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.
5. Théophile de Donder (1872 - 1957)
With an HPI of 48.88, Théophile de Donder is the 5th most famous Belgian Physicist. His biography has been translated into 18 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.
6. Léon Rosenfeld (1904 - 1974)
With an HPI of 41.72, Léon Rosenfeld is the 6th most famous Belgian Physicist. His biography has been translated into 15 different languages.
Léon Rosenfeld (French: [ʁɔzɛnfɛld]; 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 them. 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. 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.
Pantheon has 6 people classified as physicists born between 1763 and 1932. Of these 6, 1 (16.67%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living physicists include François Englert. The most famous deceased physicists include Georges Lemaître, Joseph Plateau, and Étienne-Gaspard Robert. As of April 2022, 1 new physicists have been added to Pantheon including Léon Rosenfeld.
Living Physicists
Go to all RankingsDeceased Physicists
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Georges Lemaître
1894 - 1966
HPI: 71.80
Joseph Plateau
1801 - 1883
HPI: 60.80
Étienne-Gaspard Robert
1763 - 1837
HPI: 48.98
Théophile de Donder
1872 - 1957
HPI: 48.88
Léon Rosenfeld
1904 - 1974
HPI: 41.72
Newly Added Physicists (2022)
Go to all RankingsWhich Physicists were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 5 most globally memorable Physicists since 1700.
