Leon Rosenfeld (1904 - 1974), Belgian Physicist theorist, disciple and personal friend of Niels Bohr, applied with originality the quantum theory to the description of the matter, radiations and the nuclear forces. He identified the first interstellar molecule.

Biographical elements

• Doctorate of the University of Liege (1926), followed post-doctoral stays to Paris, Göttingen, and finally Zurich, where it is familiarized with work of Heisenberg and quantum Pauli in electrodynamic.

• Of 1930 to 1940, he is member of the faculty of Liege, and nearest collaborator to Bohr, making frequent stays in Copenhagen. The principal fruit of this collaboration is their analysis of the mesurability of the quantum fields in quantum electrodynamics, published in 1933.

• Of 1940 to 1947, he is professor at the university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.

• Of 1947 to 1958, he is director of the department of theoretical physics of the university of Manchester, in England.

• Of 1958 until its death in 1974, it will occupy a pulpit with the “'' Nordita ''”, the Scandinavian institute of theoretical physics creates in 1957 on the initiative of Bohr, and installed in Copenhagen, Denmark. Price Francqui 1949.