European Organization for Nuclear Research: Widely known as CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Organization europňne pour la recherche nucläire), was established in Geneva, Switzerland in 1954 to coordinate and perform research on fundamental particles. The member states are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, West Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Leon Van Hove: Belgian theoretical physicist (1924-1990). Van Hove studied mathematics and physics at the Universit ̌Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where he received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1946. He worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey from 1949 to 1954, after meeting with Robert Oppenheimer. Later he worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and was a professor and Director of the Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. In 1958, he was awarded the Francqui Prize in Exact Sciences and in 1959 he received an invitation to become the head of the Theory Division at CERN in Geneva, where he spent three decades. The Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) was proposed during Van Hove's tenure as Director General of CERN. Van Hove's research interests were in mathematics, solid state physics, particle and nuclear physics, and cosmology.