Vocation : Science : Physics

Xavier Le Pichon (born 18 June 1937 in Qui Nhơn, French protectorate of Annam (later South Vietnam and today Vietnam)) is a French geophysicist. Among many other contributions, he is known for his comprehensive model of plate tectonics (1968), helping create the field of plate tectonics. In 1968 he combined the kinematic ideas of W. J. Morgan, D. McKenzie and R. L. Parker with the large data sets collected by Lamont, and especially with the respective magnetic profiles, to show that Plate Tectonics could accurately describe the evolution of the major ocean basins. He is professor at the Collège de France, holder of the Chair of Geodynamics (1986–2008). He is a lifelong devout Catholic, and has come to think of caring attention to others' weakness as an essential quality that allowed humanity to evolve. He lives with his wife and has five children and eleven grandchildren.

Raymond Daudel (2 February 1920 – 20 June 2006) was a French theoretical and quantum chemist.
Trained as a physicist, he was an assistant to Irène Joliot-Curie at the Radium Institute. Daudel spent almost the entirety of his career as professor at the Sorbonne and director of a laboratory of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He is quoted as saying that the latter "was much better because the CNRS was very rich". This allowed Daudel to attract many co-workers from elsewhere in France and internationally.
Raymond Daudel was Officier de la Légion d'honneur and Officier de l'Ordre National du Mérite. He served as President of the European Academy of Arts Sciences and Humanities, in Paris, France. Daudel was a founding member and Honorary President of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.An author as well as an academic, Raymond Daudel authored several books, including Quantum chemistry, originally with R. Lefebyre and C. Moser in 1959 (Interscience Publishers, Inc., New York) and later with G. Leroy, D. Peeters, and M. Sana, published by Wiley in 1983. He was responsible for the organization of the first International Congress in Quantum Chemistry, held in Menton, France in 1973.

Vincent E. Courtillot (born 6 March 1948) is an emeritus French geophysicist, prominent among the researchers who are critical of the hypothesis that impact events are a primary cause of mass extinction of life forms on the Earth. He is known for his book "La Vie en catastrophes" (Paris, Fayard, 1995), translated into English as "Evolutionary catastrophes" (1999).

Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron (French: [klapɛʁɔ̃]; 26 January 1799 – 28 January 1864) was a French engineer and physicist, one of the founders of thermodynamics.

Pierre Victor Auger (French pronunciation: [oʒe]; 14 May 1899 – 24 December 1993) was a French physicist, born in Paris. He worked in the fields of atomic physics, nuclear physics, and cosmic ray physics. He is famous for being one of the discoverers of the Auger effect, named after him.

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (French pronunciation: [nikɔla leɔnaʁ sadi kaʁno]; 1 June 1796 – 24 August 1832) was a French mechanical engineer in the French Army, military scientist and physicist, often described as the "father of thermodynamics". He published only one book, the Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire (Paris, 1824), in which he expressed the first successful theory of the maximum efficiency of heat engines and laid the foundations of the new discipline: thermodynamics. Carnot's work attracted little attention during his lifetime, but it was later used by Rudolf Clausius and Lord Kelvin to formalize the second law of thermodynamics and define the concept of entropy. Driven by purely technical concerns, such as improving the performance of the steam engine, Sadi Carnot's theoretical work laid important foundations for modern science as well as technologies such as the automobile and jet engine.
His father Lazare Carnot was an eminent mathematician, military engineer, and leader of the French Revolutionary Army.

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat (French: [ivɔn ʃɔkɛ bʁy.a] ; born 29 December 1923) is a French mathematician and physicist. She has made seminal contributions to the study of Einstein's general theory of relativity, by showing that the Einstein equations can be put into the form of an initial value problem which is well-posed. In 2015, her breakthrough paper was listed by the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity as one of thirteen 'milestone' results in the study of general relativity, across the hundred years in which it had been studied.She was the first woman to be elected to the French Academy of Sciences and is a Grand Officier of the Légion d'honneur.

Christian Andreas Doppler ( ; 29 November 1803 – 17 March 1853) was an Austrian mathematician and physicist. He formulated the principle – now known as the Doppler effect – that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer.

Walther Gerlach (1 August 1889 – 10 August 1979) was a German physicist who co-discovered, through laboratory experiment, spin quantization in a magnetic field, the Stern–Gerlach effect. The experiment was conceived by Otto Stern in 1921 and successfully conducted first by Gerlach in early 1922.