Édouard Brézin

Édouard Brezin
Born	(1938-12-01) 1 December 1938 Paris, France
Nationality	French
Fields	Physics
Alma mater	École Polytechnique École des ponts ParisTech

Édouard Brézin (French: [bʁezɛ̃]; born December 1, 1938 Paris) is a French theoretical physicist. He is professor at Université Paris 6, working at the laboratory for theoretical physics (LPT) of the École Normale Supérieure since 1986.

Brézin studied at École Polytechnique before doing a PhD. He worked at the theory division of the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique in Saclay until 1986.

Brezin contributed to the field of physics that deals with the macroscopic physical properties of matter and high energy physics. He was a leader in critical behavior theory and developed methods for distilling testable predictions for critical exponents. In using field theoretic techniques in the study of condensed matter, Brezin helped further modern theories of magnetism and the quantum Hall effect.

Brézin was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences on February 18, 1991, and served as president of the academy in 2005-2006. He also is a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences (since 2003), a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 2002), a foreign member of the Royal Society (since 2006) and a member of the Academia Europaea (since 2003). He is a commander in the French National order of merit and an Officer of the Legion of Honor.

He is Chair of the Cyprus Research and Educational Foundation. He was awarded the 2011 Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics together with John Cardy and Alexander Zamolodchikov.

Notable publications

• E Brezin and C Itzykson, "Pair production in vacuum by an alternating field ". Physical Review D2 (1970) 1191
• E Brezin, DJ Wallace and KG Wilson, "Feynman-graph expansion for the equation of state near the critical point" Physical Review Letters 29 (1972) 591
• E Brezin, JC Le Guillou and J Zinn-Justin "Wilson's theory of critical phenomena and Callan-Symanzik equations in 4-epsilon dimension". Physical Review D8 (1973) 434.
• E Brezin and J Zinn-Justin, "Renormalization of the non-linear sigma model in 2+epsilon dimension ; application to the Heisenberg ferromagnets". Phys. Rev. Letters 36 (1976) 691
• E Brezin, C Itzykson, G Parisi and JB Zuber "Planar diagrams". Comm. in Math. Phys. 59 (1978) 35
• E Brezin, DJ Gross "The external field problem in the large N limit of QCD". Phys. Letters B97 (1980)120
• E Brezin, B Halperin and S Leibler, "Critical wetting in 3 dimensions". Phys. Rev. Letters 50 (1983) 1387
• E Brezin, DJ Gross and C Itzykson, "Density of states in the presence of a strong magnetic field and random impurities". Nucl. Phys. B235[FS11] (1984) 24
• E Brezin, DR Nelson and A Thiaville "Fluctuation effects near Hc2 in type II superconductors". Phys. Rev. B31 (1985) 7124
• E Brezin and V Kazakov, "Exactly solvable field theories of closed strings".Phys. Letters B236(1990)144
• E Brezin and A Zee, "Universality of the correlations between eigenvalues of random matrices". Nucl. Phys. B402 (1993) 613
• E Brezin and S Hikami, "Intersection numbers of Riemann surfaces from Gaussian matrix models". Comm. Math. Phys. 283 (2008) 507

Books

• The large N expansion in quantum field theory and statistical physics, E Brezin and S Wadia, World Scientific (1993)
• Introduction to statistical field theory, E Brezin, Cambridge University press (2010)

See also

• List of members of the National Academy of Sciences

External links

• (French) Pr Brézin's page on the Academy's site
• (French) Pr Brézin's biography on the Academy's site
• (French) Communiqué of November 30, 2004 including a biography