Léon Rosenfeld


Léon Rosenfeld 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. 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.
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 and a son, Jean Rosenfeld.

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.