Evry Schatzman

Who was Evry Schatzman?

Évry Léon Schatzman was a French astrophysicist.

His father, Benjamin Schatzman, was a dentist born in Tulcea, Romania and emigrated at a young age with his family in Palestine. 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. He began work at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in the fall of 1945 and received his doctorate in March 1946. He then worked at Copenhagen Observatory and Princeton University before beginning to teach at the University of Paris in 1949, where he remained for 27 years. During this period Schatzman also taught at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. 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-time researcher. Schatzman retired in the fall of 1989.

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, §5–6 and explained pressure ionization in white dwarf atmospheres. He was one of the proponents of the wave heating theory of the solar corona. Schatzman proposed the mechanism of magnetic braking, by which outflows slow down the stellar rotation.