Anthony French


Anthony Philip French was a British physicist. At the time of his death he was professor emeritus of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Biography

French was born on 19 November 1920, in Brighton, England. French won a scholarship to study at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, receiving his B.A. in physics in 1942.
In 1942, he was recruited by Egon Bretscher to the British effort to build an atomic bomb at the Cavendish Laboratory. By 1944, Tube Alloys had been merged with the American Manhattan Project and French was sent to Los Alamos.
In 1945 he married Los Alamos mathematician Naomi Livesay.
When the war ended, French returned to Cambridge University and the Cavendish Laboratory where he joined the faculty at Pembroke College, becoming a fellow and director of studies in natural sciences. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 1948 based on some of his declassified work from Los Alamos. French also briefly worked at the newly formed Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire.
In 1955, French relocated to the University of South Carolina and was soon appointed chair of the physics department. At this time he wrote the textbook Principles of Modern Physics. He left South Carolina in 1962 to take a faculty position in the MIT Physics Department, where he remained until he retired and was named emeritus in 1991. French's main interest was undergraduate physics education. He was chairman of the Commission on Physics Education of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and president of the American Association of Physics Teachers. He was also a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
French's wife Naomi died in 2001. In 2002 he married Dorothy Jensen. French died on 3 February 2017.

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