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L?on Nicolas Brillouin was a French physicist. He was born in S?vres (near Paris), France. His father, Marcel Brillouin, was a physicist as well. He made contributions to quantum mechanics, radio wave propagation in the atmosphere, solid state physics, and information theory.

Brillouin was a founder of modern solid state physics for which he discovered, among other things, Brillouin zones. He applied information theory to physics and the design of computers and coined the concept of Negentropy to demonstrate the similarity between entropy and information. Brillouin offered a solution to the problem of Maxwell?s demon. In his book, Relativity Reexamined, he called for a "painful and complete re-appraisal" of relativity theory which "is now absolutely necessary." - Wikipedia

French-American physicist and son of Marcel Brillouin (1854-1948) and Charlotte Mascart, who was herself the daughter of E. Mascart (1837-1908), a well-known French physicist of the 19th century. L?on Brillouin was educated at the ?cole Normale Sup?rieure (1908-1912), as was his father before him. He was professor at the Sorbonne (1928), and subsequently professor at the College de France (1932-1949), again following his father?s footsteps.

During the war, L?on Brillouin emigrated to the United States, where he became a professor at the University of Wisconsin (1941) and Harvard (1946). He became an American citizen in 1949, was appointed director of Electronic Education at IBM (1948-53), and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1953. From 1953 to his death in 1969, he was a professor at Columbia University in New York City.

L?on Brillouin specialized in quantum mechanics, and developed the BWK method of approximating solutions to the Schr?dinger equation in 1926. He discovered the famous "Brillouin zones " of solid state physics, which are named in his honor. During his career, he authored more than 200 papers (his biography lists 212 of them) and about 15 books. - http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/BrillouinLeon.html