Georges Bruhat


Georges Bruhat was a French physicist.

Life and academic career

Bruhat studied physics from 1906 until 1909 at the École normale supérieure of Paris, with, among other, Henri Abraham, Marcel Brillouin and Aimé Cotton, and at the Sorbonne, among others with Gabriel Lippmann and Edmond Bouty. After being awarded a first degree in mathematics and physics, he taught for a year at Gymnasium and afterwards was an assistant at the École normale supérieure de Paris, which gave him time to prepare his PhD thesis with Aimé Cotton in Optics, which he defended in 1914 before the start of World War I.
During the war he was involved with the development of devices for detection via sound, for which he received the Croix de guerre. Starting in 1919 he became a professor at University of Lille and then in 1927 at the Faculté des sciences in Paris, assigned to ENS. In 1935 he became acting director and in 1941/42 Director of ENS. In 1940 he succeeded Eugene Bloch who had been removed by the Vichy Regime's antisemitic laws. In 1944 he was arrested by the Gestapo since he was unwilling to collaborate in locating a student member of the French resistance at the school. On 16 August, 1944, he was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp and died on 1 January 1945 in Sachsenhausen of a lung infection.
Georges Bruhat performed research in optics and was known in France for his four-volume physics texts. The volume on electricity appeared in 1924, that on thermodynamics in 1926, the volume on optics in 1930, and that on mechanics in 1934. A monograph on polarisation was published in 1930.
He is the father of mathematician François Bruhat and physicist Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat.
The Three Physicists Prize was founded in 1951 to honor Georges Bruhat along with Eugene Bloch and Henri Abraham.

Publications

Literature