Frédéric Joliot-Curie, French physicist, shared Nobel Prize in physics with wife Irène Joliot-Curie, for artificial radioactivity.
Frédéric Joliot ( (19 March 1900 – 14 August 1958) was born in Paris and graduated from the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris. In 1925 he became an assistant to Marie Curie at the Radium Institute. He fell in love with her daughter Irène Curie, and married in 1926. At the insistence of Marie, Joliot-Curie obtained a second baccalauréat, a bachelor's degree, and a doctorate in science, doing his thesis on the electrochemistry of radio-elements.
Frédéric and Irène changed their surnames to Joliot-Curie after they married on October 4, 1926 in Paris, France. Eleven months later, their daughter Hélène, was born, who would also become a noted physicist. Their son, Pierre, born in 1932, was a biologist. Frédéric Joliot-Curie devoted the last years of his life to the creation of a centre for nuclear physics at Orsay, where his children were educated.
Frédéric Joliot's Career
Joliot was a lecturer at the Paris Faculty of Science when he collaborated with his wife Irène with a research on the atom structure, in particular, on the projection of nuclei, which was an essential step in the discovery of the neutron. In 1935, the couple was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
In 1937 Frédéric Joliot left the Radium Institute to become to become a professor at the Collège de France. He worked on chain reactions and the requirements for the successful construction of a nuclear reactor that uses controlled nuclear fission to generate energy through the use of uranium and heavy water.
He was one of the scientists mentioned in Albert Einstein's letter to President Roosevelt as one of the leading scientists on the course to chain reactions. The Second World War, however, largely stalled Joliot's research, as did his subsequent post-war administrative duties.
Post-war Career
After the Liberation, he served as director of the French National Center for Scientific Research, and appointed by Charles De Gaulle in 1945, becoming the first High Commissioner for Atomic Energy of France.
In 1944 French physicists, Pierre Auger and Jules Gueron were working on the British nuclear weapons research program at Chalk River in Canada. As France was being liberated by the Normandy invasion, they informed Joliot-Curie of the progress of the American/British nuclear weapon program. Frederic passed on that information to his Soviet friends. In 1948 he oversaw the construction of the first French atomic reactor.
A devout communist, he was relieved of his duties in 1950 for political reasons. Joliot-Curie was also one of the eleven signatories to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955. Although he retained his professorship at the Collège de France, on the death of his wife in 1956, he took over her position as Chair of Nuclear Physics at the Sorbonne.
Joliot-Curie was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and of the Academy of Medicine. He was named a Commander of the Legion of Honour and also awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951 for his work as president of the World Council of Peace.
Legacy of Frédéric Joliot-Curie
A Moon crater is named "Joliot" after him. A street in an upmarket neighborhood of Sofia, Bulgaria and the nearby metro station is named after Frédéric Joliot-Curie. In Canada, there is a street named after him in the Riveriere-des-Praire burrough of north Montreal.
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