Les Houches School of Physics

[1] Between its participants there have been famous Nobel laureates in Physics like Enrico Fermi, Wolfgang Pauli, Murray Gell-Mann and John Bardeen amongst others.

[3] The school was created as a post-World War II effort to improve the standard of modern physics in Europe, which was lagging behind the United States.

[1] She was inspired by her experience in the Girl Scouts and 1949 Richard Feynman's Ann Arbor annual Summer Symposium, at the University of Michigan, which DeWitt-Morette attended.

[3] With a reduced budget, she settled to open the school in a rustic farm surrounded by chalets, a few kilometers from the village of Les Houches.

[3] The school was publicized by her French colleagues: Yves Rocard at the École normale supérieure, Louis Leprince-Ringuet at École polytechnique, Louis de Broglie and Alexandre Proca at the Institut Henri Poincaré, and Francis Perrin at the Collège de France and CEA who hired a secretary to handle the paperwork.

[3] Nobel laureate Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, a student in 1955, recalled[3] It was extremely spartan ... We were lodged in small wooden chalets, barely furnished.

[3] Subsequently, a number of scientific summer schools opened all over Europe following the same model, partly with the support of Advanced Study Institutes program of NATO.