Jean-Louis Steinberg

Jean-Louis Steinberg (1922–2016) was one of the main pioneers of radio astronomy in France. In 1953 he was a co-founder of the project to create the Station de Radioastronomie de Nançay (which opened in 1956).

Biography
Jean-Louis Steinberg had a brother who was 3 years older, a brother who was 13 years younger, and a sister who died shortly after birth. In World War I, their father was wounded at the Battle of Verdun and awarded the Croix de Guerre. Until he was 14 years old, J.-L. Steinberg attended the École alsacienne. In 1937 he began study at the Lycée Saint-Louis. After passing a qualifying examination, he enrolled at Sorbonne University. There in 1941 he joined the French Communist Party and the Resistance. In 1943 his younger brother was taken in as a lodger by a farm family in Normandy. In 1944 J.-L. Steinberg graduated with a doctorate in engineering from the ENS Paris college of Sorbonne University. In June 1944, he, his parents, and his older brother were rounded up because of their Jewish ethnicity. On July 4th, the family arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of the 4 family members, J.-L. Steinberg was the only survivor seven months later. J.-L. Steinberg's younger brother was never deported to a concentration camp and also survived. J.-L. Steinberg married Madeleine White in 1946. They adopted his younger brother and had a son, Alain, in 1948.

At his return in France in 1945, Steinberg, working with Jean-François Denisse under the influence of Yves Rocard, developed radio astronomy in France. Steinberg and Denisse were the co-founders in 1953 of the Paris Observatory's radio astronomy station in Nançay. Steinberg played a major part in the construction of the large decimeter radio telescope, which was officially inaugurated in May 1965 by Charles de Gaulle but became fully operational only in 1967.

In 1963 Steinberg founded in 1963 the Paris Observatory's Service d’Astronomie Spatiale (service of space astronomy) in Meudon. The service launched, in 1965 and 1967, two French Rubis rockets with low-frequency receivers and with deployment of very long dipole antennas for detection in space of radio waves with frequency less than 3 MHz. He was the originator of the Stereo-1 experiment on board the Soviet Mars 3 mission launched in 1971. The experiment successfully showed for the first time the directivity of solar radio bursts of Types I and III. A similar experiment for detection at lower frequencies was launched in 1973 on board the Soviet Mars 7 mission.

From 1962 to 1969, J.-L. Steinberg was the editor-in-chief of the journal Annales d’Astrophysique. His editorial work was assisted by his wife Madeleine, who spoke English and Russian fluently. In April 1968 astronomers and astrophysicists from several European countries agreed to merge their various astronomical and astrophysical journals into a single European astronomical journal. J.-L. Steinberg, Jean-François Denisse, Jean-Claude Pecker, Jan Oort, Anders Reiz, and Stuart Pottasch played important roles in the founding of the journal. The first edition of the resulting journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics, was published in 1969 with Steinberg and Pottasch as the two co-editors-in-chief. The journal Astronomy and Astrophysics merged five scientific journals as of January 1969, with a sixth (the Swedish journal Arkiv för Astronomi) merged somewhat later. Steinberg was a co-editor-in-chief from 1969 to 1973, when he resigned in favor of Jean Heidmann (1923–2000).

Jean-Louis Steinberg wrote a 12-page, English-language autobiography, published in 2001, and coauthored several papers on French radio astronomy published in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage from 2007 to 2011.

In 1979 the Société Française de Physique (SFP) awarded him the Prix Félix-Robin. In November 2017 a workshop was held as a memorial to him, and, on the Paris Observatory's Meudon campus, a building was named after him. The asteroid 13499 Steinberg is named in his honour.