Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat,
née Baudot (1912 – 1980) first studied philosophy and then joined the group of theoretical
physics around L. de Broglie at the Institut Henri Poincaré, in 1925. She wrote her PhD
thesis with him on the “Theory of the photon in a Riemannian space” in 1939. The “second
part” of the thesis was done under the supervision of Jean Perrin on “Artificial Radioactivity”.
It seems that she received her degree only in 1941. Since 1956 she became Professeur à la
Faculté des Sciences of the University of Paris (Sorbonne); in this faculty she thus joined
her teacher L. de Broglie. Mme. Tonnelat held a diploma in the history of science and, since
1949 regularly taught courses in this field as well. She also created an interdisciplinary seminar
on the History of Sciences. Among her publications in this field, a book on the history of the
relativity principle is to be noted [645*]. In 1945 she received the prize “Pierson Perrin” and in
1970 the prize “Henri Poincaré” of the Academy of Sciences in Paris [418, 92*]. Tonnelat also
published a volume of novellas.