Pierre Célestin Sabatier (11 July 1935 – 13 July 2023) was a French physicist.

Biography

Pierre Célestin Sabatier was born in

Casablanca Casablanca, also known in Arabic as Dar al-Bayda ( ar, الدَّار الْبَيْضَاء, al-Dār al-Bayḍāʾ, ; ber, ⴹⴹⴰⵕⵍⴱⵉⴹⴰ, ḍḍaṛlbiḍa, : "White House") is the largest city in Morocco and the country's econom ...

, Morocco on 11 July 1935. The grand-nephew of

François Nau François Nau (13 May 1864 at Thil – 2 September 1931 at Paris) was a French Catholic priest, mathematician, Syriacist, and specialist in oriental languages. He published a great number of eastern Christian texts and translations for the first ...

, he graduated from

École Normale Supérieure École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, Savoi ...

, Paris in

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

and

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 ...

in 1958 then spent a year in

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

where he was a pupil of Professor Eugene Wigner. He was awarded his doctorate at the Paris-Sud 11 University in 1966. He had worked on

scattering theory In mathematics and physics, scattering theory is a framework for studying and understanding the scattering of waves and particles. Wave scattering corresponds to the collision and scattering of a wave with some material object, for instance sunli ...

, and, during the two years he had to serve in the French Navy, on coastal engineering and applied geophysics. His conclusions of the first interdisciplinary meeting on Inverse Problems (published in "Mathematics of Profile Inversion", L. Colin, Editor. NASA TM X-62, 1971) proved to be correctly predictive up to now. Sabatier was President of the 20th section (nuclear and particle physics) of the Conseil supérieur des Universités (1976–1983; later called CNU, and where he served almost 20 years), the Founding Editor of the journal ''Inverse Problems'', IOP, 1985–20??, he initiated the RCP264 workshops in Montpellier, and is one of the foremost exponents of the field of inverse problems (see Inverse Problem). He published almost 200 articles and books, in domains going from pure mathematics to earth and ocean sciences, in particular the authoritative book on "Inverse Problems of Quantum Scattering Theory", coauthored with K.Chadan (2nd English Edition, Springer 1989), and the encyclopedic one on "Scattering", coedited with E. R. Pike (Academic Press 2002). Sabatier was a Distinguished Professor at Montpellier University, Distinguished Lecturer in Physics of the

University of Alberta The University of Alberta, also known as U of A or UAlberta, is a public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford,"A Gentleman of Strathcona – Alexander Cameron Rutherfor ...

(from 1993), Doctor honoris causa of the

University of Lecce The University of Salento ( it, Università del Salento, called until 2007 ''Università degli Studi di Lecce'') is a university located in Lecce, Italy. It was founded in 1955 by Giuseppe Codacci Pisanelli. The university of Salento commenced act ...

(from 1992), Fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP), and later served on the boards of the two Journals "Inverse Problems" and "Inverse and ill-posed Problems". He later published Memories in "Rêves et Combats d'un enseignant-chercheur. Retour Inverse." (L'Harmattan 2012). Pierre Sabatier died in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

on 13 July 2023, at the age of 88.

References

Sources

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Sabatier, Pierre 1935 births 2023 deaths French physicists People from Casablanca