bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Charles Enrique Dent, 25 August 1911 - 19 September 1976
Authors: Neuberger Albert
Published: December 2006

Charles Dent was born in Burgos, Spain, on 25 August 1911. His paternal grandfather, who was a Church of England parson in Coverdale, a Cambridge M.A., and reputed to be a good Greek scholar, died under the age of 40. Charles’s father was Dr Frankland Dent, who studied chemistry in Leeds and, as was not unusual before World War I, went afterwards to Munich to acquire a Ph.D. He then joined the Rio Tinto Mining Company and worked in Spain, where he met his wife and married her in 1903. Charles’s mother was Carmen Colsa de Miray Perceval, who came from a well established Spanish family. She had been orphaned early in her life and was educated in a convent. She died in 1976 only a short time before Charles, in her hundredth year. Soon after his marriage, Dr Frankland Dent accepted a post in Singapore, which at that time was part of the Straits Settlement. Dr Frankland Dent was the government chemist and analyst, responsible for a territory which is now Malaysia and Singapore. The two eldest children were born in Singapore, but Charles’s mother decided to return to Spain for the birth of her third child. After about a year in Burgos, the family returned to Singapore and stayed there until the outbreak of war in 1914. Mrs Dent then decided to come to England with her children, but travelling across the Continent at that time was not easy, and the family spent some time near Marseilles before finally settling in Bedford in 1915, where Charles received his early education. He attended Bedford School for a few years where he did well at games, but showed no particular interest in academic subjects. This worried Charles’s father, and a change of school was considered desirable.
Arthur Erdélyi, 2 October 1908 - 12 December 1977
Authors: Jones Douglas Samuel
Published: December 2006

Arthur Erdélyi was a gifted expositor and, like prophets, gifted expositors are not welcome in their homeland, particularly when it is controlled by Nazis. So, in 1939, he joined the growing band of refugees from the continent of Europe and arrived in Britain, destined for Edinburgh. At Waverley station, carrying a battered suitcase and very little money, he was met by Barry Spain who had been deputed by Professor E. T. (later Sir Edmund) Whittaker to give him two pounds and fix him up with lodgings. At the same time Walter Ledermann was called in to act as interpreter since Erdélyi spoke practically no English though his German was fluent. From these welcoming signs Arthur realized that he was to be made at home and thus was started an association with Edinburgh which was to flower into a major love of his life, sufficient to bring him back from the U.S.A. many years later at considerable personal sacrifice. His earlier life had not been without vicissitude. He was born in Budapest on 2 October 1908, the eldest of five children of Ignác Jόzsef Ármin Diamant and Frieda (néeRoth) but his name was changed later when he was adopted by his mother’s second husband after his father’s death. He went to school in Budapest (primary 1914-18, secondary 1918-26) and, while a schoolboy, witnessed the rising of the Communists under Béla Kun. It was during this time that he gained his fluency in German, reading extensively from advanced texts in mathematics.
Francis Charles Fraser, 16 June 1903 - 21 October 1978
Authors: Marshall Norman Bertram
Published: December 2006

Francis Charles Fraser, internationally respected as a leading authority on whales, dolphins and porpoises, spent most of his career (1933-69) in the British Museum (Natural History). His introduction to cetology could not have been better. From 1925 to 1933 he was a zoologist on ‘DiscoveryInvestigations’, charged with the main task of studying the life and death of whales in relation to their physical and biological surroundings in the Southern Ocean. Fraser’sDiscoveryresearch, as will be seen, was considerably more than that represented in his definitive study on the development of krill (Euphausia superba), the food of the large baleen whales. His publications from the Museum were almost entirely concerned with cetaceans. That he was able to pursue this research, despite the heavy and increasing demands of museum and other duties, was due to his adroitness as an organizer and the disciplined way he divided his time. There was also his determination, which matched his sturdy figure. His personal qualities will emerge as this memoir proceeds. But it is right now to say that many remember him with affection and miss the warmth of his company.
Gilbert Roberts, 18 February 1899 - 1 January 1978
Authors: Kerensky Oleg Alexander
Published: December 2006

Gilbert Roberts was bom in Hampstead on 18 February 1899. His father, Henry William Roberts, a pharmaceutical chemist, died of tuberculosis when Gilbert was a young child and his mother married again. Gilbert had an elder sister and a half-brother who served in the Merchant Navy, and Gilbert looked after him like a father. Both died before Gilbert. The Roberts relatives, who originated in Wales but lived in Folkestone, were mostly musicians and artists. Gilbert’s grandfather was a musician of some distinction; he composed Victorian dance tunes and, at one time, gave piano lessons to John Ruskin. There were two elderly aunts with whom Gilbert used to stay while on holidays. His mother sent him to Bromley High School and it was there that he got a glimpse of the theatre; he took a keen interest in school plays. He was a very bright boy, interested in arts and science with a gift for mathematics. After school he went to Gresham College to study engineering but war had broken out and Roberts was determined to join the Royal Flying Corps. He was under age, but was accepted and, after short training, commissioned as second lieutenant. He was attached to 73 Squadron and sent out to France as an observer —which in those days meant solo-flights in a Moth or as a member of a crew in a bomber.
William Stewart Duke-Elder, 22 April 1898 - 27 March 1978
Authors: Lyle T. K. , Miller Stephen , Ashton Norman Henry
Published: December 2006

William Stewart Duke-Elder was born in Dundee, 5 miles south of his home, the Manse at Tealing, the second of three sons of the Rev. Neil Stewart Elder, Minister of the United Free Church of Scotland, and his wife Isabella, née Duke, the daughter of the Rev. John Duke, also a Minister of the United Free Church of Scotland at Campsie, Stirlingshire. Stewart’s father—the son of John Elder, a merchant in Thurso, Caithness, and his wife, Anne Sutherland—was a scholarly man. Among the prizes he gained was a book given in the Annual Competition in the Town of Thurso, 1871, for ‘the greatest Proficiency in Highest Greek’. Perhaps with others it may have laid the foundation for Stewart’s own fluent, lucid style of writing. There were no eminent scientific or literary forebears in the family, but he relished the thought of an ancestor hanged for sheep-stealing. The Elders are a sept of the Clan Mackintosh whose Coat of Arms bears the Cat o’ Mountain (the Wild Cat of Caithness) and their motto ‘Touch not the Cat bot (without) glove’. Duke-Elder’s own Arms bear the Caithness cats as supporters, and his motto ‘Concilio et labore’.
Frank Dixey, 7 April 1892 - 1 November 1982
Authors: Dunham Kingsley Charles
Published: December 2006

Sir Frank Dixey, geological explorer, often unaided, of tracts of uncharted country in west, central and east Africa, pure and applied geomorphologist, a leading expert on hydrogeology, occupied a unique place in British science. In the last days of empire, when the Colonial Office began to take geology and mineral resources seriously, he became geological adviser to the Minister. In 1948 he was given the task of forming a Directorate of Colonial Geological Surveys and for twelve years he served as its first director. For twelve further years he was active as hydrologist for the United Nations Organization, and finally for the Government of Cyprus, achieving socially valuable results. He was deeply interested in the problems of the arid lands.
Derek Ainslie Jackson, 23 June 1906 - 20 February 1982
Authors: Kuhn Heinrich Gerhard , Hartley Christopher
Published: December 2006

Derek Ainslie Jackson was born in Hampstead, London, on 23 June 1906. His father, Sir Charles James Jackson, F.S.A., was a barrister, also a landowner and art collector. He was well known as an authority on English silver and author of books on this subject:English goldsmiths and their marks(1905) andIllustrated history of the English plate(1911). His collection of silver is now at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. Derek and his twin brother Vivian greatly admired their father; although they were only 14 when he died, Derek’s life-long interest in art probably owed much to his father’s influence. The mother, Ada Elisabeth, daughter of Samuel Owen Williams, appears to have taken little part in the education of the twins; she died when they were only 18. The only other child was their sister Daphne who was 10 years older than the twins and had little contact with them; she died during World War I. The twins thus grew up almost like orphans, in conditions of material wealth and in surroundings of culture and select taste, but apparently with little parental guidance. After their father’s death a guardian was in charge of the family finances, and up to the age of 30 Derek and Vivian Jackson depended on him for the income from the trusts established by their father.
Frederick Denys Richardson, 17 September 1913 - 10 September 1983
Authors: Jeffes J. H. E.
Published: December 2006

Denys Richardson, as he was generally called by his friends, was born in September 1913 in Streatham, the third of a family of four. The Richardson family came from generations of farmers in Yorkshire. Denys’s great-grand father, John, broke this tradition and by setting up a brewery for black beer in Hull was the only known ancestor to have shown any technological bent. (The business was unsuccessful and John and later generations centred their lives on London and the southern counties.) Both Denys’s grand father and father were involved in the clothing trade; his father’s business was in Bombay but his wife could not tolerate the climate so that his immediate family lived in London at 19 Killieser Avenue, Streatham , where his father rejoined them during his annual leaves. When he was three years old Denys’s father died suddenly of a cerebral stroke. A year later his mother rented a house at St Helens on the outskirts of Hastings, in rural surroundings and from which the sea could be seen, some three miles away.
Honor Bridget Fell, 22 May 1900 - 22 April 1986
Authors: Vaughan Janet Maria
Published: December 2006

Honor Bridget Fell was born on 22 May 1900, the ninth and last child of Colonel William Edwin Fell and Alice Fell (
née
Pickersgill-Cunliffe). She had six sisters and two brothers; one brother, the younger of the two, being a Down’s syndrome child who died aged eight. She was therefore very much the ‘baby’ of the family, the other brother being eight years older than her. She was born at Fowthorpe near Filey in Yorkshire. The family had moved there from Sussex where they owned a farm, Springhead, near Steyning. Her father was a minor landowner but cannot be said to have been a successful farmer. It was his misfortune that he was farming during the worst of the agricultural depression. His main interests were the army and horses, both of which he managed to combine. During the Boer War he spent much of his time in the United States procuring horses for dispatch to the British Army in South Africa. He was keenly interested in nature and animals, and her family think Honor inherited her deep attachment to biology from him. Her mother was a very different type of person. She was extremely practical, a very capable carpenter and no mean architect. She designed the house at Fowthorpe and supervised its construction. She was in every sense the matriarch of the family and carried the burden of bringing up a large family in circumstances that could never have been very easy. She lived to a ripe old age dying in 1951. The families of Fells and Pickersgill-Cunliffe were large and widespread. There was a family journal printed and published quarterly for the sum of 7 shillings per annum. Honor is mentioned on several occasions, notably in the report of her sister Barbara’s wedding where, as a schoolgirl of 13, she appeared carrying her pet ferret, Janie, to the consternation of the rest of the family. In many ways they were a gifted and remarkable family— all had great artistic ability, the brother was a gifted engineer, they all lived into their 80s, and one managed to pass 90.
Maurice Harold Macmillan, First Earl of Stockton, 10 February 1894 - 29 December 1986
Authors: Hogg Quintin Mcgarel
Published: December 2006

In Harold Macmillan, first Earl of Stockton, the Society has lost arguably the most distinguished and certainly one of the longest lived of recent Fellows elected under Statute 12, that is for services and achievements outside the range of the natural sciences. He was also one of the most skilful of 20th-century prime ministers, and the last public figure to grow to maturity before the outbreak, in August 1914, of World War I. He was highly endow ed by nature with first-class mental equipment, marred only by the fact that his distinguished military service prevented the acquisition of the university degree, which he would undoubtedly otherwise have achieved, almost certainly with a double first to his credit. His complex inner character is m ore difficult to assess. He was very much his own man. He was something of an actor, playing several parts, the crofter’s great-grandson, the duke’s son-in-law, the flaneur in Edwardian society who survived into another age, and latterly the decrepit elder statesman, given to reminiscence and often to historical analogy, sometimes a little far-fetched. Of undoubted religious commitment, unquestionable personal integrity and of proven physical courage displayed often in the first, and once at least during the second world war, he was nonetheless somewhat devious in political manoeuvre and, occasionally, as in the Suez crisis, given to sudden and even contentious changes of mind.
Leonard Harrison Matthews, 12 June 1901 - 27 November 1986
Authors: Harrison Richard John
Published: December 2006

Leonard Harrison Matthews was born at Clifton, Bristol, and was the eldest child of Harold Evan Matthews, a manufacturing chemist who had studied at the London School of Pharmacy where he had won prizes and medals, and Ruby Sarah Harrison, formerly a pharmacist. Known to many as ‘Leo’, and to others as the intrepid explorer ‘El-Aitch-Em’, he had earlier in his career been nicknamed ‘Matt’, and then ‘Hyaena’ Matthews. He was the last of the great travelling naturalists of his day having visited South America, the Falklands and South Georgia, the Antarctic and the Arctic, Europe and Africa to observe and dissect animals varying in size and diversity from copepods to whales. His extensive knowledge of animals and their habits was incorporated in a long series of research papers and popular books that have already become valued collectors’ items. He was never better than at meetings at the London Zoo when talking on animals newly introduced to the Collections or fostering discussion on papers read to the Zoological Society. No laboratory experimentalist, he frequently claimed that the animals themselves performed naturally all the experiments that he would wish to conduct. When in detective mode, and wearing his cape and carrying a swordstick, he always seemed to the writer an incarnation of Chesterton’s
The man who was Thursday
.
Rodney Robert Porter, 8 October 1917 - 6 September 1985
Authors: Perry Samuel Victor
Published: December 2006

Rodney Robert Porter was a scientist of outstanding ability and great distinction who has been described as the father of modern immuno- chemistry. As a young man he was so astonished by the biological properties of the immunoglobulins that he devoted the whole of his scientific life with an unwavering intensity to the study of the biochemistry of the immune system. He had the capacity to inspire enormous respect coupled with warm personal feelings in all those with whom he came in contact in his scientific career. Still full of vigour and scientific achievement at the age of 67 he was tragically killed in a road accident on 6 September 1985.
Alexander Stuart Watt, 21 June 1892 - 2 March 1985
Authors: Greig-Smith P.
Published: December 2006

Alexander Stuart Watt was an ecologist who made a major contribution to the study of British vegetation. The ideas on the dynamics of plant communities in his Presidential Address to the British Ecological Society in 1947, 'Pattern and process in the plant community’ revolutionized the understanding of natural vegetation throughout the world. He was a scientist of a kind which is now uncommon; though always ready to advise those who sought his help, he rarely worked in collaboration, but made his major and lasting contribution to the understanding of vegetation entirely by his own work. He carried out extensive and meticulous field work, which was continued long after formal retirement, gave deep consideration to the data and presented his results in papers which are models of precision and clarity.
Sir Harold Jeffreys, 2 April 1891 - 18 March 1989
Authors: Cook Alan Hugh
Published: December 2006

Harold Jeffreys stood out among the small group of pioneers who developed the physical study of the Earth from its primitive condition at the beginning of the 20th century to its state at the launch of the first
Sputnik
. He, above all, applied classical mechanics to investigate the interior of the Earth. He showed that the core of the Earth is liquid and that there is a substantial difference between the upper and lower mantle, as we now call them. His massive analyses of travel times of seismic waves (with K.E. Bullen, F.R.S.) are still standards of reference and are currently being brought up to date. Jeffreys retired from his Chair at Cambridge (but certainly not from active study) just after the first
Sputnik
had been launched, and as powerful new methods in seismology and marine geophysics were coming into use. Geophysics has since expanded out of all recognition so that it is easy to lose sight of Jeffreys’s earlier contributions. There have been considerable changes in the concepts and methods of geophysics from some that he established, yet the major spherically symmetrical elements of the structure of the Earth that he did so much to elucidate, are the basis for all subsequent elaboration, and generations of students learnt their geophysics from his book
The Earth
.
Christopher Howard Andrewes, 7 June 1896 - 31 December 1987
Authors: Tyrrell David Arthur John
Published: December 2006

Christopher Howard Andrewes passed peacefully away on 31 December 1987 at the home of his son. He was a man of great significance in the development of the subject of virology in Britain, and indeed in the world. Furthermore, his life spanned a period of great changes in the organization of science and in the way that research in the medical sciences was conducted. In a way his personal career and his research output reflect the transition from a period when biology was largely a descriptive subject to one when analysis and technology were applied and began to give us an insight into the fundamental processes involved, down to the molecular level. Though he entered with great enthusiasm into this process and the progression of knowledge, he retained to the end his schoolboy love of natural history, and the world of nature as we experience it. He left behind a considerable inheritance of important scientific observations and concepts and also a cohort of individuals whom he had taught or had influenced in other ways to understand or practise science.
Ralph Alger Bagnold, 3 April 1896 - 28 May 1990
Authors: Kenn Maurice J.
Published: December 2006

Inspiration from ‘the thrill of the unknown’, a ready acceptance of ‘the irresistible challenge’, an inquiring mind, and a rugged, independent, self-sufficient character perhaps all determined that Ralph Alger Bagnold’s life should be one of continuous exploration. However, the successes achieved throughout by Bagnold’s meticulously planned forays into the deserts, and into his scientific researches, without doubt also stemmed from his innate determination, fortitude, imagination, thoroughness, acute observation, perceptive intellect and quiet modesty. Although Bagnold tended to be shy by nature, he was discerning and sociable with his friends. He greatly respected their various talents and maintained contact for many years with the special nucleus of friends made at Cambridge and with those who later shared in his desert explorations and in his scientific researches.
Herbert Fröhlich, 9 December 1905 - 23 January 1991
Authors: Mott Nevill Francis
Published: December 2006

Herbert Fröhlich who died in Liverpool on 23 January 1991, at the age of 85, was one of the group of theoretical physicists who started research just after the new quantum mechanics was formulated, and subsequently spent their lives in applying it to outstanding problems of physics and chemistry, and in Fröhlich’s case also to biology. This group included such figures as Hans Bethe, Rudolf Peierls, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, as well as the author of this article; most of them came from Central Europe and, with the rise of Hitler, made their careers in England or the United States, with very positive effects on the development of science in both these countries. Fröhlich, apart from a short stay in the Soviet Union and some months in Leiden, spent his whole career after the rise of Hitler based in Bristol and then in Liverpool; he made extended visits to Germany, Japan and America. His interests were unusually wide. As early as 1936 he published (in German) the first book to be devoted to the application of quantum mechanics to electrons in metals (i)*. In Bristol, already before and during the war, he developed a theory of dielectric behaviour, and in particular dielectric breakdown, which attracted much interest in the electrical industry, and financial support. At the same time he worked with Kemmer and Heitler on a problem of particle physics, a subject in which he maintained a deep interest throughout his life. Later, in Liverpool, he turned his attention to the unsolved problem of superconductivity. Here he pointed out that electron-phonon interaction could produce a weak attraction between the electrons. Although a proof that the resultant pairing lead to superconductivity had to await the Nobel prizewinning work of Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer a few years later, Fröhlich was confident that the origin of superconductivity lay in this attractive force, and predicted that the strength of this force, and hence the transition temperature, would depend on the vibrational frequency of the phonons and therefore on the isotopic mass. This was a turning point in our understanding, as most physicists realized. During the later years of his active career, which lasted until a few weeks before his death, he created an important new subject, applying concepts developed in his work on superconductivity to certain problems of biology.
Reginald Cockcroft Sutcliffe, 16 November 1904 - 28 May 1991
Authors: Sawyer John Stanley
Published: December 2006

Reginald Sutcliffe's career as a meteorologist - first as a civil servant and later as a university professor - spanned a period of more than four decades during which there were remarkable changes in the extent of meteorological knowledge and in the manner of its application. In the 1920s, when Sutcliffe entered the scene, there was a basic understanding of the physics and thermodynamics involved in weather systems, and the equations of motion had been formulated for an atmosphere on a rotating globe, but weather forecasting was almost entirely a matter of experience and empiricism, dominated by the then new Norwegian frontal theory. Climatology was a matter of simple statistics of basic weather elements. Meteorological research was in the hands of scattered individuals, specialists in some aspect of the science. By the 1970s, when Sutcliffe retired, the prediction of weather systems had been put on a quantitative basis with numerical computation on electronic computers of both the physics and dynamics. The study of climate had been transformed into the study of the physics and dynamics of the atmosphere on the grandest scale, and substantial scientific teams were working on these problems in both universities and meteorological services. Professor R.C. Sutcliffe played a noteworthy role in bringing all these changes about.
Henry Solomon Lipson, 11 March 1910 - 26 April 1991
Authors: Woolfson Michael Mark
Published: December 2006

Henry Solomon Lipson was born in Liverpool on 11 March 1910, the youngest child, and only son, of the three children of Isaac and Sarah Lipson. He came from immigrant stock; all four grandparents were Polish Jewish emigres who had settled in Liverpool towards the end of the 19th century. The family occupational background was in the general area of shopkeeping and commerce with no tradition of higher education or professional qualifications. Henry’s father, whose small business had failed when Henry was a baby, left the family for a time while he attempted, unsuccessfully, to set up a better life for them in Canada. He returned home disillusioned but determined to make the best of the opportunities England had to offer. After a period of unemployment he eventually became a steelworker at Shotton, near Liverpool. Henry Lipson was very proud of his father, a man of poor education who, when times were hard, determinedly used the only asset he had, his great physical strength, to support his family. He recorded that his father also had strength of character since he avoided the coarser habits, swearing and excessive drinking, of most of the steelworkers in the area.
Ben Lockspeiser, 9 March 1891 - 18 October 1990
Authors: Edwards A. P. J.
Published: December 2006

Ben Lockspeiser was born on 9 March 1891 to Jewish parents who had recently arrived from Eastern Europe. He had an orthodox Jewish upbringing in a lively immigrant community in the East End of London. Music was a familiar part of daily life and he became an extremely competent pianist, while his brother Edward became a musicologist and authority on Debussy. He was educated at the Grocers’ School, Hackney, and from there won an Open Science Scholarship to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (his school proclaimed a public holiday to celebrate this). He read the Natural Sciences Tripos Part I, gaining a first, followed by the Mechanical Sciences Tripos in 1913. After a short period of study at the Royal School of Mines he enlisted with the RAMC in 1914 and was landed at Gallipoli. He maintained he survived only because he was invalided out of the peninsula with dysentery. He then worked for a time in Egypt on a treatment for this disease.
Kurt Mahler, 26 July 1903 - 26 February 1988
Authors: Coates John Henry , Van der Poorten A. J.
Published: December 2006

Kurt Mahler, F.R.S., F.A.A., was born on 26 July 1903 at Krefeld am Rhein in Germany; he died aged 85 on 26 February 1988 in Canberra, Australia. From 1933 onwards most of his life was spent outside of Germany; but his mathematical roots remained in the great school of mathematics which existed in Germany between the two world wars. Above all Mahler lived for mathematics; he took great pleasure in lecturing, researching and writing. It was no surprise that he remained active in research until the last days of his life. He was never a narrow specialist and had a remarkably broad and thorough knowledge of large parts of current and past mathematical research. At the same time he was oblivious to mathematical fashion, and very much followed his own path through the world of mathematics, uncovering new and simple ideas in many directions. In this way he made major contributions to transcendental number theory, diophantine approximation,
p
-adic analysis, and the geometry of numbers. Towards the end of his life, Kurt Mahler wrote a considerable amount about his own experiences; see ‘Fifty years as a mathematician’ , ‘How I became a mathematician’ , ‘Warum ich eine besondere Vorliebe für die Mathematik habe’, ‘Fifty years as a mathematician II’. There is also a recent excellent account of his life and work by Cassels (1991). In preparing this memoir we have freely used these sources. We have also drawn on our knowledge of, and conversations with, Mahler whom we first met when we were undergraduates in Australia in the early sixties.
Rosalind Venetia Pitt-Rivers, 4 March 1907 - 14 January 1990
Authors: Tata Jamshed Rustom
Published: December 2006

Rosalind Pitt-Rivers died on 14 January 1990 at her home in the village of Hinton St Mary, Dorset. She is best remembered for the discovery of the thyroid hormone triiodothyronine, which earned her worldwide recognition. Virtually all her scientific career, although twice interrupted by family events and the World War II, was dedicated to the Medical Research Council. Her attractive personality, wit and generosity meant that she left behind numerous friends and admirers. Despite her success as a scientist, Rosalind remained genuinely modest and retained continued interest in new developments in her area of work and in the careers and problems of those with whom she maintained a close contact until the end.
John Monteath Robertson, 24 July 1900 - 27 December 1989
Authors: Arnott Struther
Published: December 2006

John Monteath Robertson (JMR), pioneering chemical crystallographer, died at Inverness in December 1989, seven months before his 90th birthday, 20 years after retiring from the Gardiner Chair of Chemistry and the Directorship of the Chemical Laboratories at the University of Glasgow in his native Scotland, and 40 years after his election to the Royal Society, whose Davy Medal he was awarded in 1960. This was the year in which his research group finally mapped the structure of limonin - the bitter principle of citrus fruits whose molecular architecture had since 1841 eluded successive schools of organic chemists. They saw its structure as the key to understanding the chemistry of an important class of bitter principles. For crystallographers it was a problem second in magnitude only to that of vitamin B
12
- solved with exceptional ingenuity by Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in 1956. Hodgkin’s solution was, essentially, a one-off and did not lead to routine analyses of families of related compounds that would provide more and better chemical insights. By contrast, although the structure of limonin was also important in its own right, solving its structure was, in addition, the opportunity for Robertson’s group to learn how to exploit the then newly available electronic digital computers routinely to make successively more accurate Fourier syntheses of the three-dimensional distributions of electron density in crystals of heavy atom derivatives of complex natural products. Thereby the complete images of many terpenoid materials could be seen in atomic detail and the relatively laborious and often inadequate analytical tactics of organic chemists rendered redundant. Thereby also, JMR’s long career as a crystallographer, begun as a terpene chemist, achieved a peculiarly satisfying conclusion and was completed by a magnificent, decade-long Indian summer during which his research group piled new structure upon new structure, amassing a rich harvest beyond any earlier organic chemist’s dream of avarice.
Richard Evelyn Donohue Bishop, 1 January 1925 - 12 September 1989
Authors: Price William Geraint
Published: December 2006

Richard Evelyn Donohue Bishop, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Brunei University, Uxbridge, died after a short illness at Queen Alexandra’s Hospital, Portsmouth, on Tuesday 12 September 1989. Although he suffered a mild heart attack some 14 months earlier, his death was caused by the combined effects of a hepatic abscess and septicaemia. Ironically, for this very active individual, his heart had fully recovered from the earlier damage. Dick had a fine, clear mind which brought him significant achievements and honours in the scientific world. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1980), a Vice-President and Member of the Council of the Royal Society (1986-1988), a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (1977), a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineering, a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects, a Member of the Royal Aeronautical Society, and a Chartered Engineer. Other awards bestowed upon him were Commonwealth Fund Fellow (1949-1951), Fellow of University College London (1964), President of the British Acoustical Society (now the Institute of Acoustics, 1966-1968), Hon. Member, Royal Corps of Naval Constructors (1968), CBE (1979), and Hon. Fellow, Portsmouth Polytechnic (now University, 1982). A distinguished engineer with an international reputation both in mechanical engineering and naval architecture, Dick was recognized as a communicator
par excellence
in matters of science and engineering. In technical matters he was a man of vision, able to discuss the principles of mathematics and engineering. He sought academic excellence and scholarship in the tasks he set himself and had the ability to take a complex dynamics problem and reduce it to a discussion or analysis of the fundamental principles involved. Although trained as a mechanical engineer, when asked about his professional background the usual response was ‘a dynamicist and a sort of engineer’. There is no doubting his love for dynamics. He enjoyed change - even change for change’s sake - and quickly became bored by statics and steady state, both professionally and in administration.
Donald Eric Broadbent, 6 May 1926 - 10 April 1993
Authors: Weiskrantz Lawrence
Published: December 2006

Donald Broadbent wrought a major change in Western psychology by his development of an ‘information processing’ approach to problems of attention, decision, memory, and control. The approach stood in contrast equally to the stimulus-bound theories of behaviorism, to introspective analyses, and to ‘folk psychology’ accounts of cognition, but can also be said to be an extension of earlier tradition that had its roots in the work of Sir Frederick Bartlett and Kenneth Craik. In a broader context, he was a strong advocate of continuing the British tradition of deriving psychological conclusions from a firm empirical basis.
Leslie Ernest Sutton, 22 June 1906 - 30 October 1992
Authors: Whiffen David Hardy
Published: December 2006

Leslie Sutton was a physical chemist whose career was in Oxford throughout, being a graduate and postgraduate student at Lincoln College and a Fellow of Magdalen College thereafter. He lived in Oxford from 1924 onwards apart from overseas visits. He could easily have obtained a chair elsewhere and he rejected a specific invitation to King’s College London partly on the grounds that it would be financially disadvantageous. There were many duties that he greatly enjoyed such as his posts as Honorary Secretary of the Chemical Society, President of the Dielectric Society, Membership of the Faraday Society Council and a long stint as sequentially Member, Treasurer and Chairman of the Lawes Agricultural Trust Committee, the governing body of Rothamsted. At the start of his career physical chemistry was expanding to include molecular structure, both in its spatial and its electronic arrangements, to supplement the more established topics of thermodynamics and kinetics. Sutton’s early visit, in the autumn of 1928, to P. Debye in Leipzig introduced him to dipole moments, their measurement and their usefulness in determining electronic and geometric structures. This influenced Sutton’s whole research career. He was probably responsible for more than half of all dielectric measurements of dipoles in Britain. Sutton’s other major interest, electron diffraction, was based on his visit to the California Institute of Technology in 1933-34. He is particularly remembered for his Editorship of
Interatomic Distances of Molecules and Ions
, Chemical Society 1958, and a later supplement. These books gave the geometrical structure for all molecules for which this information was known. Sutton’s papers show first class instrumentation, reliable measurements and include useful sections on the structural information suggested by the results. In a maudlin mood he was not always sure of his scientific abilities, but in this he was not fair to his own early work which had great influence. In his later work he tended to contribute to the solution of problems suggested by others. He admitted that he was a failure as a lecturer. He was justifiably proud of the subsequent careers of his numerous students and he kept in touch with them until the end of his life.
Charlotte Auerbach, 14 May 1899 - 17 March 1994
Authors: Beale Geoffrey Herbert
Published: December 2006

Charlotte Auerbach, known to her friends all over the world as ‘Lotte’, was born in Krefeld am Rhein and died in Edinburgh. She was known above all for her discovery in 1941 that gene mutations can be artificially induced by treatment of
Drosophila
flies with a chemical substance, mustard gas. Later she became renowned for her profound knowledge of classical genetics and especially of mutation. However, apart from her scientific eminence, she was remarkable in many ways - for her wide cultural, intellectual and humanitarian interests, and her modesty. She had a long and eventful life, part of which was tragically affected by events in Germany during the Nazi period.
John Stodart Kennedy, 15 May 1912 - 4 February 1993
Authors: Brady John
Published: December 2006

When his mother, vexed at his frequent inactivity, asked him what he had been doing, the young John Kennedy would truthfully reply, ‘Contemplating’. This became a mark of his science in later years; he thought about evidence and inference a great deal, in a subject area riddled with sloppy anthropomorphic deduction - the study of animal behaviour. He was the son of an itinerant Scottish engineer and an American mother, who met in Bangkok, where Kennedy senior was the tramway manager and she was visiting a missionary aunt. His background was strongly religious, both parents were devoutly C. of E. Indeed, his great-grandfather, the Revd John Kennedy M.A., D.D., left the Kirk of Scotland, disillusioned by its laxity, to join the evangelically more active Congregationalists. Nothing obvious in Kennedy’s childhood directed him into biology; neither he nor any of his forbears showed any interest in natural history. But the intellectual roots of his subsequent science are clearly discernible: a great-grandfather who was an outstanding religious orator, one great-uncle who was Professor of Greek and a well-known reformer at Edinburgh University, another who was President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and a father who was a qualified engineer. No doubt the women in this background were of comparable intellectual stature, but in the nature of the times, were not offered the opportunity to mark their abilities so formally.
John Sutton, 8 July 1919 - 6 September 1992
Authors: Spring J. S.
Published: December 2006

John Sutton was a geologist who made an important contribution to the understanding of the Precambrian rocks of north-west Scotland, and his methods have been applied by others in many parts of the world. His entire career was spent at Imperial College, where he was associated with the growth of the Geology Department from small beginnings to a world centre, and he took part in many of the science policy debates of the seventies and eighties. He was appointed a Vice-President of the Royal Society in 1975, and in that office he was instrumental in establishing the first contacts between the West and the scientific community in China.
Philip Burton Moon, 17 May 1907 - 9 October 1994
Authors: Burcham William Ernest , Isaak G. R.
Published: December 2006

Philip Moon was an experimental physicist whose achievements covered a wide field not only in atomic and nuclear physics but also in chemistry. He had a special talent for devising and using simple instrumentation to answer fundamental questions. Soon after the discovery of the neutron he proved that these particles could reach thermal energies in their passage through matter. He discovered the selective absorption of slow neutrons by nuclei and thereby helped to clarify the role of the particle in nuclear reactions. He was a member of the wartime MAUD Committee which advised the government on civil and military uses of atomic energy. He will be remembered for his development of high-speed rotors and for the application of this technique to the kinetics of chemical reactions, to the nuclear resonant scattering of γ radiation and to problems in relativity. Much of his academic life was spent at the University of Birmingham where he was a much loved and inspiring leader and teacher.
George William Series, 22 February 1920 - 2 January 1995
Authors: Bleaney Brebis
Published: December 2006

George William Series was an optical spectroscopist who devoted his early research at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford, to simple atoms such as hydrogen and ionized helium. These were testing grounds for new advances in both experiment and theory, particularly that of the ‘Lamb shift’. Radiofrequency measurements at Columbia University, New York, had begun immediately after the end of World War II. The team led by Isaac Isidore Rabi showed that both the fine structure and the hyperfine structure of the hydrogen atom were at variance with previous results. Modifications were needed to a theory whose bases were thought to have been well established from the first days of quantum mechanics, and quantum electrodynamics was born. After radiofrequency spectroscopy had shown that experimental physics could still show such surprises, George Series realized that optical spectroscopy should be applied to these problems. With great experimental skill, he measured the fine and hyperfine splittings of hydrogen, deuterium and ions of the light isotope of helium of atomic mass 3. He followed this with the application of optical/radiofrequency double resonance to excited states of atoms, and many other novel techniques. At Oxford, these provided exciting results, and were combined with detailed theory. Later, as Professor at Reading University from 1968 to 1982, he continued with the application of tuneable lasers to new types of optical experiments.
James Derek Birchall, O. B. E. 7 October 1930—7 December 1995
Authors: Kelly Anthony , Howard A. J.
Published: December 2006

Derek Birchall died as result of a collision with a London taxi on 7 December 1995. He had been a most prolific inventor and had recently entered academic life. He was one of the very few Fellows elected to the Royal Society this century who did not possess a university degree. Like Alfred Nobel before him, he had received little formal education, and he was fascinated by the phenomena of fire (rather than by explosion). His wife of many years, Pauline, had died in 1990, and at his death he was betrothed to Audrey Greaves

By far the greatest part of his scientific career was spent working for I.C.I., and many of his inventions were commercialized by that company.
Percy Cyril Claude Garnham, C. M. G. 15 January 1901—25 December 1994
Authors: Lainson R. , Killick-Kendrick R.
Published: December 2006

Percy Cyril Claude Garnham was born in London on 15 January 1901 and died in Buckinghamshire on Christmas Day 1994, within three weeks of his 94th birthday and only seven days before he and his wife were to celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary. Sadly, his wife Esther died a few months later. His family life was as fruitful as his long and distinguished scientific career as arguably the foremost protozoologist of his day. He and Esther are survived by six children, 19 grandchildren and 30 great–grandchildren.
Motoo Kimura. 13 November 1924—13 November 1994
Authors: Crow James F.
Published: December 2006

Motoo Kimura's research contributions can be divided into two parts. The first is a series of papers on theoretical population genetics, the quality and quantity of which place him as the successor to the great trinity, R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and Sewall Wright. The second is his neutral theory, the idea that the bulk of molecular evolutionary changes are driven by mutation and random chance, rather than by natural selection. The neutral theory brought him fame far beyond the confines of population genetics, and has made the name Motoo Kimura well-known to evolutionary biologists. (Motoo is pronounced ‘Mo-toe’, not ‘Mo-two’. By repeating the letter O, Kimura sought to indicate that this syllable was to be protracted. Unfortunately, rather than producing the desired effect, this more often led to mispronunciation.)
Raymond Arthur Lyttleton. 7 May 1911—16 May 1995.
Authors: Bondi Hermann , Hoyle Fred
Published: December 2006

Ray (as he was known to all and sundry) Lyttleton was an important figure in British theoretical astronomy. By nature heterodox, his work was yet underpinned by his remarkable command of that most traditional branch of his subject, dynamical astronomy. His fluency in the relevant fields of mathematics served well to give substance to his imaginative outlook as regards the physical aspects of astronomical and geophysical situations. He had an intense dislike of sloppiness, wherever he thought he found any. If the general herd of his colleagues appeared to him to follow a trend without having properly disproved the alternative, he could be counted on to pursue it with vigour and persistence.
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, C. H., F. B. A. 28 July 1902—17 September 1994.
Authors: Miller David
Published: December 2006

Karl Raimund Popper, the philosopher and methodologist of science, died on 17 September 1994 at the age of 92 years. Locke was a Fellow of the Royal Society, of course, and some other early Fellows, Boyle in particular, have a secure place in the history of philosophy. Whewell, an intellectual forerunner of Popper's (Medawar 1967), was elected in 1820 when the Royal Society was, according to a contemporary philosopher, ‘in a state of unstable equilibrium’; he was a mere 26, a lecturer in mathematics, and was to occupy the chair of mineralogy at Cambridge for some years before writing his exceptional studies in the history and philosophy of science. Whitehead and Russell were elected as Fellows for their mathematical work, as have been one or two more recently elected logicians. Popper is the only philosopher in modern times to have been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society primarily in recognition of his philosophical achievement.