Léon Brillouin

Léon Nicolas Brillouin ( born August 7, 1889 in Sèvres, Seine- et- Oise; † 4 October 1969 in New York ) was a French-American physicist.

Life

Brillouin was the son of the physicist Louis Marcel Brillouin (1854-1948) and his wife Charlotte Mascart. His maternal grandfather was the physicist ELEUTHERE Mascart. 1921 ended Brillouin his studies successfully with the dissertation La théorie et les quanta of the solid at the University of Paris. His doctoral examination, he passed with Marie Curie and Jean Perrin. Then he held until 1931 lectures on radio engineering at the Ecole Superieure d' Electricite. In 1928 he became professor of physics at the University of Paris and from 1932 to 1939 at the College de France. 1939/1940 he was director of the French Radio. During World War II Brillouin went to the USA, where he was a visiting professor in 1941 at the University of Wisconsin -Madison and in 1942 professor at Brown University. 1943 to 1945 he conducted research in the Division of Applied Mathematics of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. 1946 to 1949 he was a professor at Harvard University. Brillouin was naturalized in 1949 and went to IBM, as Director of Electronic Education. 1952 to 1954 he was Research Director at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory of IBM. From 1954 he was Adjunct Professor of Physics at Columbia University.

At the age of 80 years Brillouin died in 1969 in New York.

Brillouin known by theoretical work in solid state physics. In information theory, he suggested the term negentropy. He developed a proposed solution to Maxwell's demon and released an electric version of the same, the Brillouin paradox.

Since 1953 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.