Francois Englert

Francois Englert was a Belgian theoretical physicist, born in Etterbeek, Brussels, on 6 November 1932 and died on 18 June 2026, aged 93. Born to a Jewish family and a Holocaust survivor as a hidden child during the German occupation of Belgium, he trained first as an electrical-mechanical engineer before earning a physics doctorate from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in 1959, where he spent most of his career. His 1964 paper with Robert Brout, written independently of and roughly concurrently with Peter Higgs's own paper, proposed the same mass-generating mechanism; Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with Higgs, since Brout had died in 2011 and the prize is never awarded posthumously.