Elisabeth Bouchaud

Elisabeth Bouchaud (born Tibi) is a French physicist, playwright and actress born 1 March 1961. She is a member of Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA), and works at Ecole Superieure de Chimie et Physique de la Ville de Paris. Since 2015, she is also the Director of the Théâtre de la Reine Blanche in Paris.^[3]

Elisabeth Bouchaud
Elisabeth Bouchaud in 2020
Born	1 March 1961 Tunis
Nationality	French
Alma mater	École Centrale Paris
Known for	Her work on the morphology of fracture surfaces[1][2]
Awards	Lars Onsager Medal, Louis Ancel Prize, Aniuta Winter-Klein Prize
Scientific career
Fields	Physics, Theatre

She has worked in quantitative fractography, establishing some universal fractal properties of fracture surfaces,^[4] a subject pioneered by Benoit Mandelbrot.^[5] In fact, the term "fractal" itself was coined by Mandelbrot in 1975, based on the Latin frāctus meaning "broken" or "fractured".

A close-up on a crack surface looks very much like this fractal landscape.

Elisabeth Bouchaud suggested that these fractal properties could be understood in terms of the propagation of the crack front in a disordered environment, which is affected by the vicinity of a depinning transition.^[6][7]

She was awarded the Louis Ancel Prize,^[8] the Onsager Medal,^[9] and the Aniuta Winter-Klein Prize.^[10]

Literary works

Elisabeth Bouchaud wrote several short stories and plays. Two plays of them were presented at the Avignon Festival: A Contre Voix in 1994 and in 2000, and Apatride, la Tragédie de Médée in 2013.^[11][12] A Contre Voix was translated into English by Mary Luckhurst and put on at the Grace Theatre, London, in 1994. Her other plays are Les liaisons dangereuses (1989), Musical Box (1996), De la matière dont les rèves sont faits (2005) and Puzzle (2015), a stage adaptation of Puzzle of a Downfall Child by Jerry Schatzberg, put on at the theatre La Reine Blanche in 2017. In 2024, she wrote a theatre trilogy Les Fabuleuses about the life of 3 women that made breakthroughs in physicts, but were not remembered through history as male physists took the credit and the prizes: (Lise Meitner, Jocelyn Bell, Rosalind Franklin).