Louis Eugène Félix Néel was born in 1904 in Lyons, France, to Antoinette Hartmayer and Louis Néel, a director in the civil service. Néel married Hélène Hourticq in 1931. The couple had a son and two daughters. After receiving his doctorate in 1932 from the University of Strasbourg, Néel joined the faculty of the University of Strasbourg and remained there until 1945.

When Néel was beginning his doctoral work, German physicist Werner Karl Heisenberg announced his finding that large scale magnetic attraction is produced by neighboring atoms of ferromagnetic substances orienting in the same direction. Heisenberg also showed that the alignment of magnetic moments--the small amount of magnetism around each atom--became parallel at low temperatures.

In 1930, Néel, building on Heisenberg's work, suggested that there are also "antiferromagnetic" substances, with interactions that cause...