Background
Marcel Brillouin was born on December 19, 1854, in Saint-Martin-lès-Melle, Deux-Sèvres, France, his father was a painter, who moved to Paris when Marcel was a boy.
Collège de France, 11 Place Marcelin Berthelot, 75231 Paris, France
Marcel Brillouin became a physics assistant to Eleuthere Mascart at the Collège de France, while at the same time working for his doctorates in mathematics and physics, which he gained in 1880 and 1882, respectively.
École normale supérieure, 45 Rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France
Marcel Brillouin entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1874 and graduated in 1878.
Collège de France, 11 Place Marcelin Berthelot, 75231 Paris, France
Marcel Brillouin became a physics assistant to Eleuthere Mascart at the Collège de France, while at the same time working for his doctorates in mathematics and physics, which he gained in 1880 and 1882, respectively.
Institut de France, 23 Quai de Conti, 75270 Paris, France
Marcel Brillouin became a member of the Académie des Sciences de Paris in 1921.
France
Marcel Brillouin was awarded the French Legion of Honour.
educator mathematician physicist scientist
Marcel Brillouin was born on December 19, 1854, in Saint-Martin-lès-Melle, Deux-Sèvres, France, his father was a painter, who moved to Paris when Marcel was a boy.
Brillouin attended the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. The Brillouin family moved back to Melle during the Franco-Prussian War, and he spent the years 1870 and 1871 reading all the books on philosophy he could find in his grandfather’s big library.
Back in Paris in 1872, Marcel Brillouin brilliantly passed his baccalaureate the following year and became a student at the École Normale Supérieure (1874 - 1878).
He then was an assistant, at the Collège de France, to the well-known physicist Mascart. In 1880 and 1882 Brillouin obtained doctorates in both mathematics and physics.
Marcel Brillouin spent the next several years, as an assistant professor of physics, at the universities of Nancy, Dijon, and Toulouse. In 1888, Brillouin returned to the École Normale Supérieure. From 1900 on, he was a professor of mathematical physics at the Collège de France until his retirement in 1931.
In his long career, Brillouin published more than 200 papers and books. He was a great admirer of Kelvin’s lectures and wrote a preface and notes for their translation (1893); he also provided notes for a book of translations of original papers on meteorology (1900), a subject in which he was always highly interested. His interest in the kinetic theory of gases, liquids, and solids is reflected in his contribution of a preface and many notes to the French translation of Boltzmann’s book (1902). This was followed by a book on viscosity (1906 - 1907) and a number of papers on kinetic theory and thermodynamics of liquids (isotropic or anisotropic) and solids, plasticity, and melting conditions. A book on the propagation of electricity (1904) included a complete calculation of proper vibrations for a metallic ellipsoid, a problem that became later of great importance for ultrashort wavelengths.
About 1900 Brillouin spent considerable time building a new model of the Eotvos balance and testing it in the Simplon Tunnel, which was opened in 1906. This is described in a long paper published by the Académie des Sciences in 1908. The Brillouin balance was later used for oil prospecting. There followed a series of important papers on Helmholtz’ flow and surfaces of discontinuity, with applications to hydrodynamics and hydraulic problems, and a long paper on the stability of airplanes.
From 1918 to 1922, and later, Brillouin tried to find an explanation of Bohr’s condition of stable atom trajectories and their n, l, m quantum numbers. He attempted to use retarded actions of unknown nature (rather similar to de Broglie waves) and obtained stability conditions containing some sort of quantum numbers. Similar conditions were used later by de Broglie and modified by Schrödinger.
A few papers on the problem of an electromagnetic source in uniaxial or biaxial crystals are of interest for crystal optics. From 1925 on, most of Brillouin’s research centered on physics of the earth, especially tides, and was published in the Academy’s Comptes rendus. He also lectured on these subjects at the Collège de France and the Institut Poincaré (1930). His lectures on tides were edited by J. Coulomb, but most of them remained unpublished. Brillouin discussed a variety of mathematical problems in connection with tides, especially problems of varying boundary conditions, and transformations of spherical harmonics from one polar axis to another, the idea being to use, for tides, an axis of coordinates running through continental regions.
In his teaching, Louis M. Brillouin always outlined the history of the subject and organized a seminar on the history and philosophy of physics for all his student.
The interests of this wide-ranging, open-minded scientist extended from the history of science to the physics of the earth and the atom.
Louis Brillouin was a prominent theoretical physicist, but he was also a very skillful experimenter. He always had a laboratory and a large library nearby.
In 1888, Louis Marcel Brillouin married Charlotte Mascart, the daughter of Eleuthere Mascart. The couple had three children.