James Bruce French

James Bruce French (1921–2002) was a Canadian and American theoretical physicist, specializing in nuclear physics.

J. Bruce French received in 1942 his bachelor's degree in physics from Dalhousie University and served during WWII in the Royal Canadian Navy, performing acoustical studies related to antisubmarine warfare. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1948 with a thesis on relativistic calculation of the Lamb shift. From 1948 to 1950 French was a research associate at MIT. At the University of Rochester, he was from 1950 to 1951 a research fellow, from 1951 to 1956 an assistant professor, from 1956 to 1960 an associate professor, and from 1960 to 1992 a full professor, retiring in 1992 as professor emeritus.

He did pioneering research on deuteron stripping (direct reactions), the nuclear shell model, which has been cited over 700 times.

Bruce introduced formalism based on tensorial operators, which incorporated the methods of group theory and second quantization into shell-model theory. ... Through these methods, he derived sum rules and particle–hole relations, which he could use to connect seemingly disparate spectroscopic data.

J. Bruce French was the author or co-author of about 130 research articles and reviews. He was predeceased by his wife and survived by a daughter and two sons.