Albert Messiah

Albert Messiah (23 September 1921, Nice – 17 April 2013, Paris) was a French physicist. He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique. He spent the Second World War in the Free France forces: he embarked on 22 June 1940 at Saint-Jean-de-Luz for England and participated in the Battle of Dakar with Charles de Gaulle in September 1940. He joined the Free French Forces in Chad, and the 2nd Armored Division in September 1944, and participated in the assault of Hitler's Eagle's nest at Berchtesgaden in 1945. After the war, he went to Princeton to attend the seminar of Niels Bohr on quantum mechanics. He returned to France and introduced the first general courses of quantum mechanics in France, at the University of Orsay and joined the newly created atomic energy agency, the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA) where he stayed until the end of his career. His classic textbook on quantum mechanics (Dunod 1959) has trained generations of French and world physicists. He was the director of the Physics Division at the CEA and professor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University. He was honored as Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur of France (2012).