François Englert

Born 6 November 1932, Englert became a theoretical physicist at the Université libre de Bruxelles, where he joined colleague Robert Brout in tackling one of physics' thorniest problems: why some particles have mass and others don't. In 1964, they published the mechanism that generates mass by breaking symmetry in quantum fields — work done independently around the same time by Peter Higgs. The idea sat as elegant theory for decades. Englert collected the Wolf Prize in 2004 and the Sakurai Prize in 2010, sharing both with Higgs and Brout. When CERN's Large Hadron Collider finally detected the p…