André Neveu: lead climber

Theoretical physics? "A discipline that straddles the boundary between mathematics and physics, "describes André Neveu. Its goal: to create mathematical models to describe and understand experimental results. "That's exactly what Newton did when he invented universal gravitation to understand the movements of the Moon and planets observed by Kepler ," explains the specialist.

These models, whose "elegance, beauty, and simplicity" André Neveu praises, have been the essence of his work for over 50 years. First during his studies at the École Normale Supérieure, then at Princeton University from 1969 to 1971, and finally at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton—of which Einstein himself was a member—where he remained until 1977. Upon his return to France, the researcher worked for six years at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, then for the same amount of time at CERN in Geneva, before arriving at the University of Montpellier in 1989.

Various excitations of a string

If awarded in 2020, the Dirac Medal will recognize André Neveu's work since the beginning of his career: the formulation of string theory. "This model was invented to describe certain characteristics of elementary particles. It describes particles not as points, but as various excitations of a string, a bit like a piano string that has many harmonics,"explains the physicist.

This is a field of research that continues to fascinate him: "There are still many things we don't understand, or even things that are beyond our comprehension. We still need to gain a better understanding of these objects and their properties."And to advance this high-level research, André Neveu relies on exchange: "We need cross-fertilization! We need to open up and exchange ideas with colleagues from other countries who see things from a different perspective. This is essential for generating new ideas. We need to broaden our horizons to gain other points of view."

This philosophy was put into practice by André Neveu himself, and it paid off: before receiving the Dirac Medal, the researcher had already been awarded numerous prizes for his contributions to theoretical physics, including the Paul Langevin Prize from the French Physics Society in 1973 and the Gentner-Kastler Prize in 1988.