Léon Charles Prudent Van Hove (10 February 1924 – 2 September 1990) was a
Belgian physicist and a Director General of
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...
. He developed a scientific career spanning
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
,
solid state physics
Solid-state physics is the study of rigid matter, or solids, through methods such as quantum mechanics, crystallography, electromagnetism, and metallurgy. It is the largest branch of condensed matter physics. Solid-state physics studies how the l ...
,
elementary particle and
nuclear physics to
cosmology.
Biography
Van Hove studied mathematics and physics at the
Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). In 1946 he received his PhD in mathematics at the ULB. From 1949 to 1954 he worked at the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey by virtue of his meeting with
Robert Oppenheimer. Later he worked at the
Brookhaven National Laboratory and was a professor and Director of the Theoretical Physics Institute at the
University of Utrecht in
the Netherlands. In the 1950s he laid the theoretical foundations for the analysis of
inelastic neutron scattering in terms of the
dynamic structure factor In condensed matter physics, the dynamic structure factor (or dynamical structure factor) is a mathematical function that contains information about inter-particle correlations and their time evolution. It is a generalization of the structure factor ...
. In 1958, he was awarded the
Francqui Prize in Exact Sciences. In 1959, he received an invitation to become the head of the Theory Division at CERN in
Geneva. In 1975 Prof. Van Hove was appointed
CERN Director-General, with
John Adams, responsible for the research activities of the Organization. The
LEP project was proposed during Van Hove's tenure as Director General.
Awards
*
Francqui Prize, 1958
*
Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, 1962
* Member,
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1964
*
Max Planck Medal, 1974
* Member, United States
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
, 1980
* Member,
American Philosophical Society, 1980
See also
*
Quark–gluon plasma
*
Quasielastic scattering
*
Quasielastic neutron scattering Quasielastic neutron scattering (QENS) designates a limiting case of inelastic neutron scattering, characterized by energy transfers being small compared to the incident energy of the scattered particles. In a more strict meaning, it denotes scatte ...
*
List of Directors General of CERN
*
Théophile de Donder
*
Hilbrand J. Groenewold
Hilbrand Johannes "Hip" Groenewold (1910–1996) was a Dutch theoretical physicist who pioneered the largely operator-free formulation of quantum mechanics in phase space known as phase space formulation, phase-space quantization.
Biography
Groen ...
for the Groenewold–Van Hove theorem
References
External links
Léon Van HoveBiography. Cern official website.
Proc. Am. Phil. Soc. 136, 603 (1992)Scientific publications of Léon Van Hoveon
INSPIRE-HEP INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1970 ...
1924 births
1990 deaths
Belgian nuclear physicists
Belgian academics
People associated with CERN
Particle physicists
Theoretical physicists
Free University of Brussels (1834–1969) alumni
Mathematical physicists
Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences
Winners of the Max Planck Medal
Academic staff of Utrecht University
{{physicist-stub
Members of the American Philosophical Society
Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences