François Englert, Nobel-Winning Physicist, Dies at 93

Overview

• The Université Libre de Bruxelles confirmed late Friday that François Englert died in Uccle on Thursday at age 93 and described him as a central figure in contemporary theoretical physics.
• Englert co‑authored the 1964 Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism that explains how elementary particles acquire mass, a theory whose prediction of the Higgs boson was confirmed by experiments at CERN in 2012.
• Born in Etterbeek in 1932, Englert trained as a civil engineer, moved into theoretical physics, studied at Cornell where he partnered with Robert Brout, and spent much of his career at ULB.
• He shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with Peter Higgs and was ennobled as a baron in Belgium the same year; Peter Higgs died in 2024.
• ULB has issued public tributes and said Englert leaves an exceptional scientific legacy, with no public funeral plans reported so far and broader tributes and remembrances expected from the physics community.