Robert Brout

Brout, with François Englert, formulated in 1964 the mechanism by which gauge particles acquire mass — the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism — central to the Standard Model and confirmed by the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson. Born to a Jewish family in New York, he spent most of his career at the Free University of Brussels. He died in 2011, a year before the experimental confirmation of his theory.