Évry Schatzman

Évry Léon Schatzman (16 September 1920 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine – 25 April 2010[1]) was a Jewish French astrophysicist.[2][3]

His father, Benjamin Schatzman, was a dentist born in Tulcea, Romania and emigrated at a young age with his family in Palestine.[4] Schatzman began his studies at the École Normale Supérieure in November 1939. After the German invasion of France, Schatzman, who was Jewish, fled occupied France, arriving in Lyon in January 1942. He worked there for a year and then moved to Haute-Provence Observatory. He began work at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in the fall of 1945 and received his doctorate in March 1946. He then worked at Copenhagen Observatory and Princeton University before beginning to teach at the University of Paris in 1949, where he remained for 27 years. During this period Schatzman also taught at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (English: Free University of Brussels). Schatzman became an associate professor at the University of Paris in 1954. In 1976 he moved to Nice Observatory, where he eventually became a full-time researcher. Schatzman retired in the fall of 1989.[5]

Schatzman worked on white dwarfs during the 1940s. He realized that the atmospheres of white dwarfs should be gravitationally stratified, with hydrogen on top and heavier elements below,[6][7], §5–6 and explained pressure ionization in white dwarf atmospheres.[5] He was one of the proponents of the wave heating theory of the solar corona.[8][9] Schatzman proposed the mechanism of magnetic braking, by which outflows slow down the stellar rotation.[10]

Schatzman wrote the astrophysics textbook Astrophysique Générale and contributed greatly to the popularity of astrophysics in France. He received the Prix Jules Janssen of the French Astronomical Society in 1973, the Holweck award in 1985, and the Gold Medal of the CNRS in 1983. He became a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1985.[3][5]

In 1992 the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSICOP) presented Schatzman with their Distinguished Skeptic Award.[11]

Selected works

References

  1. ↑ http://www.union-rationaliste.org/index.php/20100427351/Informations/Deces-d-Evry-Schatzman.html Archived 8 August 2010 at the Wayback Machine.
  2. ↑ p. 104, L'Outil Théorie, Evry Schatzman and Isabelle Souriau, Paris: Eshel, 1992. ISBN 2-906704-44-X.
  3. 1 2 EVRY SCHATZMAN y la historia de la evolución estelar, Begoña López Betancor, I@C Noticias, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, 2-1999. Accessed on line 20 September 2007.
  4. ↑ Sylvain Rakotoarison (25 June 2010). "Évry Schatzman, le savant des astres" (in French). AgoraVox. Retrieved 13 August 2010.
  5. 1 2 3 The Desire To Understand the World, Evry Schatzman, Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 34 (1996), pp. 1–34. DOI 10.1146/annurev.astro.34.1.1.
  6. ↑ Théorie du débit d'énergie des naines blanches, Evry Schatzman, Annales d'Astrophysique 8 (January 1945), pp. 143–209.
  7. ↑ Physics of white dwarf stars, D. Koester and G. Chanmugam, Reports on Progress in Physics 53 (1990), pp. 837–915.
  8. ↑ On the theory of coronal heating mechanisms, Max Kuperus, James A. Ionson, and Daniel S. Spicer, Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 19 (1981), pp. 7–40.
  9. ↑ The heating of the solar corona and chromosphere, Evry Schatzman, Annales d'Astrophysique 12 (1949), pp. 203–218.
  10. ↑ Mestel, L., 1968, MNRAS, 138, 359−391
  11. ↑ "CSICOP's 1992 Awards". Skeptical Inquirer. 17 (3): 236. 1993.
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