Raymond Stora

Raymond Félix Stora (18 September 1930 – 20 July 2015^[1]) was a French theoretical physicist. He was a researcher at Service de Physique Théorique at CEA Saclay, then a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at CPT Marseille and at LAPP Annecy, as well as a member of CERN's theory group. His work focused on particle physics.^[1]

Stora studied at the École Polytechnique from 1951 to 1953, and then at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he received a doctorate in 1958 under the supervision of Victor Weisskopf. Stora's most influential contribution to physics was his work with Carlo Becchi and Alain Rouet on a rigorous mathematical procedure for quantizing non-Abelian gauge field theories, which dates from the mid 1970s and is now known as BRST quantization.

Stora was elected as a correspondent to the physics section of the French Academy of Sciences in 1994.^[1] In 2009, he was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics.^[2] CNRS held a special conference in his honour some months after his 80th birthday.^[3]