CHARPAK_Georges-24x50-2005.jpg: Studio Harcourt derivative work: Spatulli (talk) · CC BY 3.0

Born Hersz Charpak to a Jewish family in Poland, he was imprisoned for his work with the French Resistance and deported to Dachau concentration camp in 1944, surviving until liberation the following year. He went on to invent the multiwire proportional chamber, a particle detector that replaced the slow, hand-scanned bubble chamber and let physicists track particle collisions electronically in real time — a shift that underlies how nearly every particle-physics detector, and many medical imaging devices, has worked since. He won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Physics alone, the last time the prize went to a single physicist.