Léon Brillouin
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Léon N. Brillouin (August 7, 1889-1969) was a French physicist. His father, Marcel Brillouin, was a physicist as well. He was born in Sèvres, France. He was educated at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and later taught at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France. During World War II, he immigrated to the United States. There, he taught at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University, and later Columbia University. He died in New York City.
Along with Arnold Sommerfeld, Brillouin was the first to study the propagation of electromagnetic waves in dispersive media. In particular, he helped elucidate questions related to the transmission of information using light. He also codiscovered the WKBJ approximation in quantum mechanics and helped "exorcize" Maxwell's Demon. He discovered the Brillouin zones of Solid-state physics. Brillouin was a noted expert in Information theory and coined the concept of Negentropy.
See also: Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin-Jeffreys approximation (WKBJ approximation), Brillouin zone, Brillouin scattering, Laboratoire Léon Brillouin (the French neutron scattering center)
[edit] Works
- La theorie des solides et les quanta. Doctoral thesis, Paris 1921
- La theorie des quanta et l'atome de Bohr. Paris, Blanchard 1922
- Les Tenseurs en Mecanique et en Elasticite. Paris, Masson 1938
- Wave propagation in periodic structures: electric filters and crystal lattices. New York [u.a.]: McGraw-Hill, 1946. 2. ed., New York: Dover Publ., 1953
- Wave propagation and group velocity. New York, Academic Press, 1960
- Science and information theory, New York, Academic Press 1956. 2nd ed. 1962
- Scientific uncertainty and information, New York [u.a.]: Academic Press, 1964
- Relativity reexamined, New York [u.a.] : Academic Press, 1970
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