Bernard Sapoval was born in Paris, October 1937. He was educated at Ecole de Physique et Chimie de la Ville de Paris. Although being the smallest in size between the French "Grandes Ecoles", several important physicists studied there, including Paul Langevin as well as some Nobel laureates in Chemistry.

He rapidly became a founding member in the experimental group that Ionel Solomon was creating at that time (1962) at Ecole Polytechnique. Curiously, his first work was about the non-thermalization (a subject of recent renewed interest) of one of the simplest disordered systems that one can imagine: silicon 29 spins in pure silicon, the most simple experimental realization of a micro-canonical ensemble. He was the first to observe the existence of spin-helicon interactions. This was the subject of his Ph.D. thesis entitled "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance by Spin-Helicon Interaction in Lead Telluride" at the University of Paris in 1967, under the direction of Ionel Solomon.

His interests became then concentrated on nuclear magnetic resonance studies of semi-conductors. In 1969, he was the first, with G. Lampel and D. Kaplan to detect a new physical effect, namely, the nuclear magneto-resistance in semiconductors, also a phenomenon which is regaining interest recently, specifically on the study of quantum wells. He was also the first to measure directly the electron-nuclei hyperfine interaction in the ultra-quantum limit in In-Sb. Progressively, his interests shifted to NMR studies of solid electrolytes, a subject now known as "Solid State Ionics", a term coined by him while acting as the co-chairman of the International Meeting on Solid Electrolytes, in Grenoble 1983. One beautiful result that he obtained with H. Arribart was to show that ammonium-ions where rolling while hopping from site to site in ammonium-beta alumina.

Bernard Sapoval became Professor at Ecole Polytechnique in 1970. In 1977, he was elected Chair of the Physics Department and became the youngest ever Department chair at Ecole Polytechnique, a position that the held up to 1982. Together with this task, he was appointed Head of the Condensed Matter Laboratory at Ecole Polytechnique from 1976 to 1993. Since 1997 he is also directing a small group working on numerical experimentation at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan.

In the early eighties Bernard Sapoval participated to an IBM workshop on "Fractals" and he was one of the first to seize the importance of the fractal concept. His scientific interests became more theoretical/numerical but always triggered by experimental questions such as: What is the geometry of a soldering? How behave the vibrations of a fractal drum or a fractal acoustic cavity? Do their shape modify the damping? Is the fractal geometry of sea-coasts related to its damping efficiency? How do irregular or fractal electrodes work? How does diffusional screening play a role in the respiration of mammals?

In response to these questions he created, together with M. Rosso and J. F. Gouyet, the concept of gradient percolation to describe diffusion fronts. He formulated a fundamental conjecture about the value 7/4 for the fractal dimension of diffusion fronts. This conjecture has received considerable mathematical attention recently with the mathematical demonstration of this value by Smirnov and Werner. Gradient percolation has now become a commonly used method for the study of many systems. There is even a sub-routine of Mathematica on gradient percolation which uses a "Sapoval lattice".

He created the so-called "land surveyor approximation" for the study of the response of irregular electrodes or catalysts. His studies on the role of screening in mammals respiration has lead him to formulate a quantitative rule for the efficiency of the oxygen exchange which give, for the first time, a physical basis to the so far empirical size of the acini of mammals, whatever their mass, from the mouse to the horse.

Very recently, his seminal studies on the vibrations of surface fractals has lead to the design of an extremely efficient sound absorber which is now on the market.

Bernard Sapoval has authored or coauthored more than 150 papers and he has given around 100 invited talks around the world. The scope of his productions is notably wide. He has been invited to present talks to the American Physical Society, but also to the American Mathematical Society, the American Chemical Society and the American Geophysical Union.

He acted as the Scientific Director of the Summer school on Physics and Physical Chemistry of Fast Ion and Mixed Conductors, held in Erice in 1982. He was Physicist-chairman of the International meeting on "Solid State Ionics" , Grenoble, 1983 and Chairman of the Gordon Research Conference on Fractals, San Miniato, in 1994. He is currently leading, from the French side, a joint research program between Ecole Polytechnique and the Universidade Federal do Ceará, in Brazil.  

Bernard Sapoval was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1995. He has always been acting for the diffusion of science in the public and has received the Prize for Scientific Culture of the French Ministry of Education in 1998 for his book entitled "Universalités et Fractales". He received the Prix Gustave Ribaud of the French Academy of Science in 1999, and in 2003 he was awarded the Grand Prix Siemens de l'Innovation for Applied Research for his invention of an extremely efficient acoustic noise absorber based on his work about irregular and fractal acoustical cavities.