Anthony French
British physicist and writer (1920–2017)
Anthony Philip French (19 November 1920 – 3 February 2017) was a British physicist. At the time of his death he was professor emeritus of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Biography
French was born on 19 November 1920, in Brighton, England. French won a scholarship to study at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, receiving his B.A. in physics in 1942.
In 1942, he was recruited by Egon Bretscher to the British effort to build an atomic bomb (codenamed Tube Alloys) at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. By 1944, Tube Alloys had been merged with the American Manhattan Project and French was sent to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
In 1945 he married Los Alamos mathematician Naomi Livesay.
When the war ended, French returned to Cambridge University and the Cavendish Laboratory where he joined the faculty at Pembroke College, becoming a fellow and director of studies in natural sciences. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 1948 based on some of his declassified work from Los Alamos. French also briefly worked at the newly formed Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, Oxfordshire.
“Anthony French” enters the record as british physicist and writer (1920–2017). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Anthony, French and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Anthony French” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Anthony, French and British provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q573268. VIAF identifies the subject as 85164259. The Library of Congress control number is n50025418. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 2017, 1942 and 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anthony French” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.