Léon Van Hove

Charles Léon Van Hove ( * 1924 in Brussels; † 2 September 1990), was a Belgian physicist. His research interests evolved from mathematics via solid-state physics to nuclear physics and elementary particle physics and cosmology.

Van Hove studied mathematics and physics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB ). In 1946 he received his doctorate in mathematics at the ULB. From 1949/1950 and from 1952 to 1954 he worked at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, where he met Robert Oppenheimer. Later he worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory and was a professor and director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. In 1959 he became head of the Theory Division of CERN. After he was from 1971 to 1974 Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, he returned to CERN, where he was research director from 1976 to 1980 and remained until 1982.

In 1958 he received the Francqui price. In 1962 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics. In 1971 he was awarded the Nessim Habib Award from the University of Geneva. In 1974 he received the Max Planck Medal. He was honorary doctorates from the universities of Warsaw (1975 ), Helsinki (1977 ), Pavia (1977). Since 1959 he was a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, since 1960 the Flemish Academy of Sciences and since 1961 of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences. Since 1974 he was a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1964 he became an honorary member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a member of the American Physical Society.

His doctoral Martinus Veltman counts.