Editorial

You have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Longair Malcolm 2018EditorialBiogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc.641–6http://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2018.0002SectionYou have accessEditorialEditorial Malcolm Longair Malcolm Longair [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Malcolm Longair Malcolm Longair [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Published:28 March 2018https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2018.0002This is the latest version of the article – see previous versions. March 28, 2018: Previous Version 1 Welcome to volume 64 of Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, the first of two volumes to be published during 2018. As indicated last year, one of the major tasks which we have undertaken over the last year has been to start to catch up with the backlog of memoirs which had yet to be commissioned for deceased Fellows. Our aim is to be as comprehensive as possible and we have been endeavouring to commission as many memoirs as are feasible for Fellows who have died since 2000. We are pleased to report a very positive response and there are now over 150 memoirs being written. To cope with the increased rate of publication of Memoirs, we are most grateful to the Royal Society for agreeing to allow us to publish two volumes this year, this one now and another later in the year. We are also grateful to the Australian Academy of Sciences and the US National Academy of Sciences for allowing us to republish some of their excellent memoirs in this year's volume.Let me record my pleasure in learning of the achievements and characters of those celebrated in this volume. I suspect that other readers will have the same experience that I have had in recalling my contacts, directly or indirectly, with some of those commemorated. Two of them stand out for me. When I read the memoir of Alex Cullen, I realized that in 1962 I had travelled to Sheffield to discuss with him possible experimental work on electromagnetic surface waves as a final year undergraduate project. He suggested a topic from the book by Barlow and Brown, Radio Surface Waves, which I then carried out at Queen's College, Dundee, where I read Electronic Physics. He read my dissertation, which he liked, and corrected a conceptual error I had made and which I have never forgotten. I had no further contact with him after that time, but enjoyed his memoir greatly.The other concerns the remarkable initiatives of Richard Gregory in setting up the Exploratory in Bristol. This was a wonderful exhibition of original hands-on physics experiments, which inspired many young people. Sadly, it was decided to replace the experiments, but I was able to buy from the organization a wonderful magnetic air table on which magnetic discs moved essentially friction free. Richard had designed this to demonstrate how particles reach an equilibrium Maxwellian distribution simply by random collisional exchanges of energy. I used it in my first-year lectures for many years and it was a joy to see the students playing with it and seeing for themselves statistical mechanics in action.These anecdotes could not possibly appear in the Memoirs, but I am sure that the essays in this volume will result in similar distant fond memories—very much À la recherche du temps perdu.Memoirs are published on the Biographical Memoirs website as they become ready, before collection into the printed volumes, so please look out for new essays throughout the year.Biographical Memoirs 2018There are 21 memoirs in this first volume of 2018, spanning a huge range of the sciences. The following notes are intended to act as a guide to the different disciplines represented, with brief summaries of the achievements of the Fellows, largely taken from the memoirs’ synopses. These, and previous volumes, can be accessed on the Royal Society website.AstronomyRodney (Rod) Davies was a great inspiration to several generations of radio astronomers. In 1953, he was appointed to an assistant lectureship at the University of Manchester, later becoming the Director of Jodrell Bank (1988 to 1997) and the President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1987 to 1989). Rod worked on, and in many cases pioneered, new fields of radio astronomy throughout his career. He is best known for leading observations of the structure of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), first carried out at Jodrell Bank and transferred to Tenerife in the 1980s and 1990s.Cell biology, genetics and molecular biologyJohn Cooper's innovative research into the genetics of plant growth and development was aimed at identifying characters which would guide plant breeders in their selection programmes. Working with certain forage grasses (mainly ryegrass, but also cocksfoot and fescue), he analysed growth and development into components, including flowering time, leaf development, photosynthetic efficiency, canopy structure in the crop and nutritional quality.Ernest McCulloch was half of the brilliant partnership that discovered haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and changed how we think about human tissue generation and regeneration. Based at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto, he and physicist James Till devised experiments to identify stem cells. They were the first to demonstrate that HSCs have the dual capacity to self-renew and to differentiate into a vast array of mature haematopoietic cells. Later, he focused on characterizing the malignant cells of human leukaemias and determining the effects of various drugs on leukaemic cell growth.ChemistryDavid Craig was an outstanding Australian theoretical chemist whose academic life oscillated between Australia at the University of Sydney and Australian National University (ANU) and the UK at University College London. His best-known research was in the fields of quantum theory and spectroscopy of aromatic molecules, molecular crystals, quantum electrodynamics and chirality. He was President of the Australian Academy of Science from 1990 to 1994.Anthony (Tony) Ledwith's early work at Liverpool University is best known for the identification, characterization and use of free carbocations. His researches predominantly focused on cationic and cation radical mechanisms, but ranged widely over many aspects of polymerization mechanisms, properties and the applications of polymeric materials. He became heavily involved in science politics to the considerable benefit of the UK community, particularly chemists and polymer chemists.David Sherrington was an internationally recognized authority on reactive polymers and the use of polymer-supported reagents in novel applications. From 1972 until his retirement in 2010, his chief research base was Strathclyde University. Important contributions to the direction of his scientific activity were the secondment years he spent at Unilever, where he became involved in polymeric high internal phase emulsions. An important feature was the use of polymer supports to catalyse oxidation reactions, especially olefin epoxidation.Ian Smith was one of the world leading researchers into reaction kinetics, energy transfer and molecular dynamics in gas-phase systems. He developed both cryogenic and nozzle expansion methods for studying collisional processes at temperatures down to 10 K, resulting in the discovery that reactions without activation barriers can become faster as the temperature decreases. He was one of the first pioneers in the UK to use laser techniques to study collisional processes, using laser induced fluorescence as a sensitive detection tool, UV laser photolysis to form reactive species, and laser pumping to create excited state populations.EngineeringAlexander (Alex) Cullen was Professor and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Sheffield from 1955 to 1967, and then Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at University College London until 1980. His researches concerned electromagnetic waves over a wide range of microwave devices and measurement techniques, the latter at a fundamental level.Material scienceAnastasios (Ernest) Hondros was a renowned British metallurgist and materials scientist. At the UK National Physical Laboratory, he pioneered the measurement of thermodynamic properties of interfaces in crystalline materials and established the importance of interfacial microchemistry in the mechanical strength of engineering materials. He was subsequently appointed Director of the Petten Laboratory in the Netherlands, and later to the Directorship of the European Commission's Institute for Advanced Materials.MathematicsVladimir Arnold was a pre-eminent mathematician of the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser (KAM) theory, Arnold diffusion, Arnold tongues in bifurcation theory, Liouville–Arnold theorem in completely integrable systems, Arnold conjectures in symplectic topology—this is a very incomplete list of concepts and results named after him.Julian Besag's contributions to statistics were profound and of far-reaching consequence. He seldom wrote the last word on a subject, but was in at the start of many of the key developments in modern stochastic modelling. His many pioneering researches included spatial statistics, inference, the algebra of interacting systems, image data analysis and epidemiology. His research on Markov random fields and spatial point processes has been described as path-breaking.Peter Hall produced a body of work in both probability and statistics, the breadth and depth of which must be regarded as phenomenal during the 40 years of his research career. He displayed extraordinary technical skills together with remarkable intuition in developing and applying multifaceted mathematical approaches in the whole of his work. The impact of this wide-ranging use of powerful mathematical methods has had a profound effect on much of modern mathematical statistics.Michael Powell was a British numerical analyst who was among the pioneers of computational mathematics, first at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment Harwell and subsequently as the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Applied Numerical Analysis in Cambridge. He contributed decisively toward establishing optimization theory as an effective tool of scientific enquiry, replete with highly effective methods and mathematical sophistication. His achievements span the entire range from difficult and intricate convergence proofs to the design of algorithms and the production of software.Neuroscience and psychologyPeter Bishop was an Australian neurophysiologist renowned for his ingenious quantitative approach to the study of the mammalian visual system and his great ability in attracting a large number of talented people to visual research. Peter's research was based on specially-designed, precise instrumentation and data quantification applied mainly to analysis of the response properties of single neurones in the principal dorsal thalamic visual relay nucleus, the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (LGNd) and the primary visual cortex.Richard Gregory was a pioneer of cognitive psychology. Much of his scientific work involved the development and interpretation of visual illusions, which he used as a tool to work out the perceptual mechanisms involved in the way the visual world is normally perceived. He was also an inventor, who developed a technique for viewing microscopic objects in three dimensions and a method for taking sharp telescope images through an unstable atmosphere.Rainer (Ray) Guillery's highly imaginative and insightful work profoundly advanced understanding of the related fields of development and thalamocortical functioning. He is chiefly known for his work on the structure, function and development of thalamus and thalamocortical relationships. His work was carried out on three continents. He served on the faculty at the Universities of Wisconsin and Chicago in the United States and returned to the University of Oxford. He then moved to a post at the University of Marmara in Turkey.Nicholas Mackintosh was an experimental psychologist whose principal goal was to understand the basic mechanisms of learning and cognition, largely through research with animals. He developed a formal theory of the relationship between attention and learning that had an immediate impact. His prolific and ingenious experiments were remarkable for the profound theoretical insights they offered into the mechanisms of learning in a wide range of species. His interest in the measurement of human intelligence led to his textbook, one of the most authoritative ever written on the topic.PhysicsIan Butterworth was a major force in European particle physics from the beginnings of the subject in the late fifties. Following his PhD at Manchester, he moved to Imperial College where he was Head of both the High Energy Group and the Department of Physics. In 1983 he left Imperial to become a Research Director at CERN, before taking up the position of Principal of Queen Mary College in London. He was one of the first to recognize the value of IT advances, the importance of networking and the vast potential of the web.Walter Kohn's life epitomized both the hardships and achievements of those physicists who escaped from Nazi occupied Austria. After earning physics degrees at the University of Toronto and at Harvard, he rapidly emerged as a leader, bringing quantum theory to bear on problems in the electron theory of solids, particularly to the density-functional theory of electrons in solids and in chemical molecules. A giant of theoretical physics, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work. He was the founding Director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Martin Kruskal was one of the most versatile theoretical physicists of his generation and is distinguished for his enduring work in several different areas, most notably plasma physics, a memorable detour into relativity and his pioneering work in nonlinear waves. In the latter, together with Norman Zabusky, he invented the concept of the soliton and, with others, developed its application to classes of partial differential equations of physical significance.Plant sciencesHarry Smith was a botanist with a driving passion to understand how plant growth, development and responses to the environment are regulated. At the Universities of Nottingham and then Leicester, he carried out a classic series of experiments studying how plants detect proximity and shading by other plants. This work transformed understanding of the role of red/far infrared light-absorbing phytochrome pigments in the perception of and response to shading.AcknowledgementsIt is a pleasure to acknowledge the enormous debt we owe to the authors of the memoirs in this volume for their outstanding work in producing biographies of lasting value. I am certain these will be widely enjoyed and appreciated. I am also personally indebted to the editorial and publications team at the Royal Society whose names and roles are listed on the title page. Their outstanding efforts have again enabled us to accelerate the rate of publication of the memoirs whilst maintaining the excellence of their content and high production values. I also thank the members of the editorial board who have done sterling work in many ways, not least in suggesting potential memoir writers and reviewing the resulting memoirs.Author ProfileMalcolm LongairMalcolm Longair CBE FRS FRSE is Jacksonian Professor Emeritus of Natural Philosophy and Director of Development, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He was appointed the ninth Astronomer Royal of Scotland in 1980, as well as the Regius Professor of Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, and the director of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. He was head of the Cavendish Laboratory from 1997 to 2005. He has served on and chaired many international committees, boards and panels, working with both NASA and the European Space Agency.His main research interests are in high energy astrophysics, astrophysical cosmology and the history of physics and astrophysics. His book, Maxwell's Enduring Legacy: A Scientific History of the Cavendish Laboratory, was published in July 2016. His current projects include editing with Helge Kragh A Handbook of the History of Modern Cosmology and creating a digital archive of historic photographs illustrating the history of the Cavendish Laboratory.Footnotes© 2018 The Author(s)Published by the Royal Society Next Article VIEW FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD PDF FiguresRelatedReferencesDetails This IssueJune 2018Volume 64 Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2018.0002Published by:Royal SocietyPrint ISSN:0080-4606Online ISSN:1748-8494History: Published online28/03/2018Published in print30/04/2018 License:© 2018 The Author(s)Published by the Royal Society Citations and impact Subjectsbiographical historytwentieth century science

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