Pierre-Louis Connes (born 1928 in Dijon), astrophysicist

Son of Georges Connes, Pierre-Louis is known as an astrophysicist and director of research at the CNRS. He studied physics at the Faculty of Sciences in Dijon and defended his doctoral thesis in 1961 in Paris: “Principle and realization of a new type of interference spectrometer.” In Meudon he designed one of the largest telescopes in the world. He received several awards, including the Jaffé Prize of the Academy of Sciences in 1969. His wife, Janine Roux-Connes, was an assistant in physics for one year at the Faculty of Dijon and also had a brilliant career as an astronomer; together with Jean-Pierre Maillard, they published in 1969 an Atlas of the spectra in the near infrared of Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.