François, Baron Englert (French: [ɑ̃ɡlɛʁ]; born 6 November 1932) is a Belgian theoretical physicist and 2013 Nobel Prize laureate.

During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II, he had to conceal his Jewish identity and live in orphanages and children's homes in the towns of Dinant, Lustin, Stoumont and, finally, Annevoie-Rouillon.

[7] Brout and Englert showed in 1964[8] that gauge vector fields, abelian and non-abelian, could acquire mass if empty space were endowed with a particular type of structure that one encounters in material systems.

Brout and Englert also showed that the mechanism may remain valid if the scalar field is replaced by a more structured agent such as a fermion condensate.

[13] The eventual proof of renormalizability, a major achievement of twentieth century physics, is due to Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus Veltman who were awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for this work.

The Brout–Englert–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble mechanism is the building stone of the electroweak theory of elementary particles and laid the foundation of a unified view of the basic laws of nature.