George Charpak
Persons, originating from Poland

George Charpak

Born: March 8, 1924, as Jerzy Charpak in Dąbrowica, Poland
(now Dubrovytsia in Ukraine).
Died: September 29, 2010 in Paris, France.
He was a Polish-born French physicist from a Jewish family who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1992.

Charpak's family moved from Poland to Paris when he was seven years old. During World War II Charpak served in the resistance and was imprisoned by Vichy authorities in 1943. In 1944 he was deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, where he remained until the camp was liberated in 1945.
He graduated in 1948, as Mining Engineer and became a pupil in the laboratory of Frédéric Joliot-Curie at the Collège de France during 1949. He received his PhD in 1954 on Nuclear Physics. In 1959, he joined the staff of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, where he invented and developed the multiwire proportional chamber. In 1980, Georges Charpak became professor at the Higher School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry (ESPCI) in Paris. He retired from CERN in 1991. Charpak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1992 'for his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber'.
More information

Polonica stamps:

France 2016, 26 II