Léon Rosenfeld

Léon Jacques Henri Constant Rosenfeld (; 14 August 1904 in Charleroi – 23 March 1974 ) was a Belgian physicist and a communist activist.

Early life and education 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.

Career 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.

Personal life 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.

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.

Works

Demonstrated the logical consistency of quantum electrodynamics.