François Englert, the Belgian physicist who was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of the Higgs boson, has died at the age of 96. Englert, along with Robert Brout (posthumously recognized) and Peter Higgs, theorized the existence of the Higgs field, a fundamental force field that gives particles mass. The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012 confirmed their decades-old prediction, representing a landmark achievement in particle physics. His work provided a crucial piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, explaining why elementary particles are not massless. Englert was a professor emeritus at the Université libre de Bruxelles. The scientific community mourns the loss of a pivotal figure whose contributions reshaped our understanding of the universe.