Alain Rouet

Alain Rouet (born 1942 in France) is a French theoretical physicist, entrepreneur, poet, and novelist.

Education and career
At the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, Rouet graduated in 1969 with an engineering degree and in 1974 with a doctorate in theoretical physics. He worked as a postdoc for the academic year 1975–1976 at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) in Munich and from 1976 to 1978 at CERN. From 1979 to 1981 he was a scientist at the CNRS at the CPT (Centre de Physique Theoretique) in Marseille-Luminy. At the same time, he acted in an advisory capacity for Aérospatiale and the French Atomic Energy Commission. From 1981 to 1982 he was Einstein Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. He then moved into industry and from 1983 to 1986 was the technical director of a Thomson Group company Vidéolor, which developed television tubes.

From 1986 to 2017 he was involved in the creation and development of Science & Tec, a kind of scientific think tank that provided scientific consulting services for industry. Clients included AREVA, Bosch, EADS, and TotalEnergies. Rouet was involved in the creation and support of Science & Tec subsidiaries in Germany and Italy. From 1996 to 2003 he created and developed Quantaflow, a company that designed, manufactured, and sold an innovative system of software and hardware that counted people at places like shopping centers and airports. The Quantaflow system provided distributed architecture and web services to managers and employees for analysis and certification of customer visits.

Rouet is known for his collaborative development in the mid-1970s with Raymond Stora and Carlo Becchi of the BRST formalism (independently done by Igor Tyutin). The formalism is a method for quantizing a field theory with a gauge symmetry. In addition to quantum field theory, Rouet also did research on dynamical systems.

He received, jointly with Stora, Becchi, and Tyutin, the 2009 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics.