Jean-Baptiste Perrin

Jean Baptiste Perrin was born on 30 September 1870 in Lille, France. Perrin attended the École normale supérieure, where he became an assistant in 1894. In 1897, he received his D.Sc. from the University of Paris for a thesis on cathode rays and X-rays. In the same year, he was appointed a lecturer in physical chemistry at the University, and in 1910 became a professor.

Perrin was an officer in the Engineer Corps during World War I. In 1915, he was appointed Deputy Chief of the Directorate of Inventions for National Defense, which aimed to coordinate French laboratories in the war effort.

In 1897, Perrin married Henriette Duportal (1869–1938), the daughter of Henri Duportal, a civil engineer and ardent republican, and the granddaughter of Armand Duportal, who had been Prefect of Haute-Garonne (France). Henriette had a baccalaureate degree, which was exceptional at that time. They had two children: Aline, born in 1899, and Francis, born in 1901, who later became a physicist.. Aline married the painter Charles Lapicque. They had five children, including the poet Georges Lapicque. She herself worked as an illustrator under the name Aline Lapicque-Perrin. Francis Perrin was a physicist, a specialist in nuclear fission, and High Commissioner of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) from 1951 to 1970. He married Colette Auger, daughter of Victor Auger (professor of chemistry at the Faculty of Sciences in Paris), with whom he had three children: Nils, David, and Françoise.

After Henriette's death in 1938, Nine Choucroun became Perrin's partner. In June 1940, when the Germans invaded France, he and Choucroun escaped to Casablanca on the ocean liner Massilia, with part of the French government. In December 1941, they boarded the SS Excambion to New York City, arriving on 23 December.

Jean Perrin died on 17 April 1942 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City at the age of 71.

After the War, in 1948, his remains were transported back to France by the cruiser Jeanne d'Arc. On November 17, 1948, his ashes, along with those of his colleague and friend Paul Langevin, were transported to the Pantheon in Paris, following a national funeral.