Évry Schatzman

Évry Léon Schatzman (16 September 1920 – 25 April 2010[1]) was a French astrophysicist.[2][3]

His father, Benjamin Schatzman, was a dentist born in Tulcea, Romania and emigrated at a young age with his family to Palestine.[4] Schatzman began his studies at the École normale supérieure in November 1939. After the German invasion of France, Schatzman, who was Jewish, fled occupied France, arriving in Lyon in January 1942. He worked there for a year and then moved to Haute-Provence Observatory where he hid under the pseudonym Antoine Emile Louis Sellier.[5] He was hired by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in the fall of 1945 and received his doctorate in March 1946. He spent time at Copenhagen Observatory and Princeton University before beginning to teach at the University of Paris in 1949, where he remained for 27 years. His daughter, mathematician Michelle Schatzman was born in 1949. He was long at the Institut d'Astrophysique, a CNRS organization built in the garden side of l'Observatoire. During this period Schatzman also taught at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (English: Free University of Brussels). Schatzman became an associate professor at the University of Paris in 1954. In 1976 he moved to Nice Observatory, where he eventually became a full researcher. Schatzman retired in the fall of 1989.[6]

Schatzman worked on white dwarfs during the 1940s. He realized that the atmospheres of white dwarfs should be gravitationally stratified, with hydrogen on top and heavier elements below,[7][8]^{, §5–6} and explained pressure ionization in white dwarf atmospheres.[6] He was one of the proponents of the wave heating theory of the solar corona.[9][10] Schatzman proposed the mechanism of magnetic braking, by which outflows slow down the stellar rotation.[11]

Schatzman wrote the astrophysics textbook Astrophysique Générale and contributed greatly to the popularity of astrophysics in France. He received the Prix Jules Janssen of the Société astronomique de France (French Astronomical Society) in 1973, the Holweck Prize in 1985, and the Gold Medal of the CNRS in 1983. He became a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1985.[3][6]

In 1992 the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSICOP) presented Schatzman with their Distinguished Skeptic Award.[12]