Marie Bloch

Biography

Marie Bloch was born on July 26, 1902, in Lyon, France, as one of five children in a Jewish family. Her father, Salomon Bloch, was a watchmaker who had immigrated from Hégenheim, Switzerland, and was reportedly the guardian of Lyon's synagogue. The Bloch family traced its roots to a Jewish clan that had settled in Alsace in the 17th century; her grandfather relocated the family to Lyon after Alsace was seized by Germany following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. In 1918, Bloch earned a scholarship to attend the Ecole Technique Municipale, a school founded by Lyon's mayor, E. Herriot, and she graduated two years later. She went on to receive a certificate in General Mathematics from the Faculty of Sciences in 1932, also completing coursework in Differential and Integral Calculus, Rational Mechanics, General Physics, and Advanced Astronomy.

Bloch began her career as an auxiliary staff member at the Lyon Observatory. By 1925, she was the official user of the observatory's bent equatorial telescope, and in October 1926, she was formally hired as an assistant astronomer under Jean Dufay. During World War II, Bloch was forced to leave her position because she was Jewish. With help from Maurice Durvis, she went into hiding and worked at a coal purchasing company. After the war, she returned to the observatory. Bloch collaborated closely with Chinese astronomer Cheng Maolan while he lived in France. Together, they worked on spectrophotometry of stars and night-sky light, and Bloch was noted as one of two young astronomers—the other being Charles Fehrenbach—observing at the Haute-Provence Observatory. Their research focused on spectroscopic binary star systems, including AX Persei, Z Andromedae, AG Pegasi, BF Cygni, CI Cygni, and T Coronae Borealis. They determined the color temperature of the cool component of Z Andromedae to be 5070K. In 1960, Bloch received the French Lalande Prize for her scientific achievements. She died on August 1, 1979, in Meyzieu.