Léon Jacques Henri Constant Rosenfeld (; 14 August 1904 in Charleroi – 23 March 1974Léon Rosenfeld's Marxist defense of complementarity, by Anja Skaar Jacobsen ) 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.
Rosenfeld obtained a PhD at the University of Liège in 1926, and he was a close collaborator of the physicist Niels Bohr from 1930 until Bohr's death in 1962.
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.Leon Rosenfeld and the challenge of the vanishing momentum in quantum electrodynamics, by Donald Salisbury 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.Rosenfeld, Léon (1948). Nuclear Forces. Interscience Publishers, New York, xvii.
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.
He was elected to membership of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1948.Memoirs And Proceedings Of The Manchester Literary And Philosophical Society Vol-xci (1950)
In 1949 Léon Rosenfeld was awarded the Francqui Prize for Exact Sciences.
Works
Demonstrated the logical consistency of quantum electrodynamics.
References
External links
Oral history interview transcript for Léon Rosenfeld on 3 September 1968, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives