Son of author and politician Jean-Maurice Le Corbeiller and his wife Marguerite Dreux, Philippe entered the École Polytechnique in 1910, training there in engineering and the mathematical sciences.
[2] From 1929 to 1939, Le Corbeiller served in the French ministry of communications (Ministère des Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones) as a research engineer[3] and taught at the École Supérieure d’Électricité (Supélec).
[7] At Harvard, Le Corbeiller had a major influence on the work of economic theorist Richard M. Goodwin, who used concepts from nonlinear systems to describe the business cycle in macroeconomics.
[9] He was actively involved in the initiative of Harvard President James Bryant Conant to develop a history of science–based general science education, collaborating in that effort with other lecturers such as Edwin C. Kemble, Gerald Holton, I. Bernard Cohen, and Thomas Kuhn.
[4] They had one son, Jean, who graduated from Harvard in 1948, and who worked as editor of Scientific American magazine and as professor at the Seminar and Lang Colleges of the New School for Social Research, in New York City.
In 1952, Philippe Le Corbeiller's mother donated to Harvard's Fogg Museum a bouillon cup and a saucer reportedly used by Marie Antoinette during her imprisonment and passed down through Madame Campan.