Hélène Langevin-Joliot facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Hélène Langevin-Joliot
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Langevin-Joliot in 2012
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Hélène Joliot-Curie
19 September 1927 Paris, France
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| Spouse(s) | Michel Langevin |
| Children | Yves Langevin, Françoise Langevin-Mijangos |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | CNRS |
| Thesis | Contribution à l'étude des phénomènes de freinage interne et d'autoionisation associés à la désintégration β. (1956) |
Hélène Langevin-Joliot (born Hélène Joliot-Curie on September 19, 1927) is a famous French nuclear physicist. She is well-known for her important research on how atoms react, which she did in laboratories in France. She comes from a very famous family of scientists. Her grandparents were Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie. Her parents were Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. All four of them won Nobel Prizes for their amazing work in science.
After she retired from her research career, Hélène started working to encourage more girls and women to join STEM fields. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. She also works to help everyone understand science better.
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Early Life and Education
Hélène Langevin-Joliot was born in Paris, France, on September 19, 1927. She became interested in science very early in her life. She saw her parents, Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie, win a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935.
Hélène was very good at math when she was a child and a teenager. Because of this, her parents encouraged her to study physics. Physics is the field she chose for her education and her job. As a teenager, she studied at the École Nationale de Chimie Physique et Biologie de Paris, where she did very well in her studies.
Later, she studied at the IN2P3 (which means Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics) in Orsay. This laboratory was actually started by her parents, Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. After getting her first degree, she began working on her advanced degree in nuclear physics. She studied how particles behave when they slow down and how atoms can lose electrons. She earned her doctorate in nuclear physics from the Collège de France for this work.
Career in Science
After getting her doctorate, Langevin-Joliot started working for the CNRS in 1949. She was a researcher there and mostly studied nuclear reactions. These are reactions that happen inside the nucleus of an atom.
She became the director of research at CNRS in 1969. She continued her research there until she retired in 1992. When she retired, she was given the special title of Director of Research emeritus. This title honored her important research and her leadership at CNRS.
During her career, she also did research for other places. From 1949 to 1957, she worked at the Laboratory of Chemistry and Nuclear Physics at the Collège de France. After that, she worked on nuclear reactions for the Institut national de physique nucléaire et de physique des particules until 2008.
Towards the end of her career, she also advised the French government. She was part of the Scientific Advisory Group for the government's office on science and technology from 1985 to 1992. She also helped with the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the discovery of radioactivity from 1996 to 1998.
She is a professor of nuclear physics at the Institute of Nuclear Physics at the University of Paris. She is also a director of research at the CNRS. Hélène Langevin-Joliot is also well-known for actively encouraging women to choose jobs in science. She leads the group that gives out the Marie Curie Excellence award. This award goes to excellent researchers in Europe. From 2004 to 2012, she was the president of the French Rationalist Union. In this role, she gave talks and wrote articles to promote science and technology.
Encouraging Others
Hélène Langevin-Joliot is also famous for her work in encouraging women to join STEM fields. She does this by giving interviews and sharing stories about her mother and grandmother. She is happy to see more women entering scientific fields. She hopes that more girls will be inspired by her family's story to follow their own interests in science.
She has also worked to help people understand science better through her interviews and talks about her own career and her family's work. She has written a lot about her family and their contributions to physics and science. She doesn't agree with the idea that Marie Curie "sacrificed" her life for science.
Through her work with the Association for Scientific Culture and the Promotion of Reason and Science (also known as the Rationalist Union), she supports the peaceful use of nuclear energy. She writes about this in their magazine, Raison Présente.
Her Scientific Family
Hélène Langevin-Joliot comes from a family of very famous scientists.
- Her grandparents on her mother's side were Marie and Pierre Curie. They are famous for studying radioactivity. They won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1903 along with Henri Becquerel. Marie Curie was the first person ever to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Her second Nobel Prize was in chemistry in 1911. She won it for discovering the elements radium and polonium.
- Her parents were Frédéric Joliot-Curie (who was taught by Marie Curie) and Irène Joliot-Curie. They won a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935. They discovered something called Induced radioactivity.
- Her brother, Pierre Joliot, is a well-known biophysicist. He has made important discoveries about photosynthesis, which is how plants make food.
Because of her family's amazing history, Langevin-Joliot often gives interviews and talks about them. Her deep knowledge of her family's past led her to write the introduction for a book called Radiation and Modern Life: Fulfilling Marie Curie's Dream. This introduction included a short history of the Curie family.
Her husband, Michel Langevin, was also a nuclear physicist. He was the grandson of another famous physicist, Paul Langevin. Hélène's son, Yves (born in 1951), is an astrophysicist, who studies space and stars.
Selected Works
Hélène Langevin-Joliot has written many scientific papers and books. Here are a few examples:
- "Contribution à l’étude des phénomènes de freinage interne et d’autoionisation associés à la désintégration β". Annales de Physique. Vol. 13. No. 2. 1957.
- "Marie Curie and Her Time". Chemistry International 33.1 (2011): 4.
- "Radiation And Modern Life: Fulfilling Marie Curie's Dream". 2004.
- "Marie Curie, ma mère". 2022.
See also
In Spanish: Hélène Langevin-Joliot para niños
