Léon Van Hove

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Léon Van Hove (Brussels, 1924 - 2 September 1990), was a Belgian physicist. He developed a scientific career from mathematics, over solid state physics, elementary particle and nuclear physics to cosmology. He studied mathematics and physics at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). In 1946 he received his PhD in mathematics at the ULB. From 1949 to 1954 he worked at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study by virtue of his meeting with Robert Oppenheimer. Later he worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and was a professor and Director of the Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. In 1958, he was awarded the Francqui Prize on Exact Sciences. In 1959, he received an invitation to become Leader of the Theory Division at the CERN in Geneva, where he would spend three decades.