Date of appointment: 26 july 1993.
By proposal of: Faculty of Physics.
Date of investiture: 11 march 1994.
Sponsor: Dr. Carles Ferreira García and Dr. Mariano Aguilar Rico.
Robert Gaston André Maréchal was born in 1916 in La Garenne.
He graduated in the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1941, and received the title of engineer of the Ecole Supérieure d'Optique in 1943.
He was professor and professor of the Sorbonne and later of the Institute of Optics in Orsay.
Maréchal worked as director of research at the French Ministry of Education, and later as general director of the Institut d'Optique Théorique et Appliquee and the Ecole Supérieure d'Optique from 1968 to 1983.
Maréchal was well known for his early work on the combined effects of diffraction and aberration. His research led him to formulate the "Maréchal criterion", a condition for the maximum intensity to deviate from the absolute maximum obtained in the center of a ventilated place by less than 20%.
Maréchal was president of the International Commission for Optics from 1962 to 1966, honorary vice president of the Comité Français de Physique, and was a founding member of the Franco-Finnish Association for Scientific and Technical Research. He was also a member of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Technologies.
