Malcolm Longair | |
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![]() Malcolm Longair in 2013 at the James Webb Space Telescope Advisory Committee (JSTAC), held at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore. Portrait by Mark McCaughrean of the European Space Agency | |
Born | Malcolm Sim Longair 18 May 1941 [1] Dundee, Scotland |
Education | Morgan Academy |
Alma mater | |
Spouse | [1] |
Awards | Britannica Award (1986) [1] |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Natural philosophy |
Institutions | |
Thesis | The evolution of radio galaxies (1967) |
Doctoral advisor | Martin Ryle [2] |
Doctoral students | |
Website | www |
Malcolm Sim Longair CBE FRS FRSE [5] (born 18 May 1941) [1] is a British physicist. From 1991 to 2008 he was the Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. [6] [7] [8] [9] Since 2016 he has been Editor-in-Chief of the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society . [10]
He was born on 18 May 1941, [11] and educated at Morgan Academy, Dundee, Scotland. [1] He graduated in Electronic Physics from Queen's College, Dundee, which later became the University of Dundee, but was then part of the University of St Andrews, in 1963. He became a research student in the Radio Astronomy Group of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in 1967 [12] supervised by Martin Ryle. [2]
From 1968 to 1969, he was a Royal Society Exchange Visitor to the Lebedev Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he worked with Vitaly Ginzburg and Yakov Zeldovich.
He held a Fellowship of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 from 1966 to 1968 and was a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge from 1967 to 1980. He has held visiting professorships at the California Institute of Technology (1972), the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1978), the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (1990) and the Space Telescope Science Institute (1997). From 1980 to 1990, he held the joint posts of Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Regius Professor of Astronomy of the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. He is a Professorial Fellow and Vice-President of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He was Deputy Head of the Cavendish Laboratory with special responsibility for the teaching of physics from 1991 to 1997, and Head of the Cavendish Laboratory from 1997 to 2005.
Longair's primary research interests are in the fields of high-energy astrophysics and astrophysical cosmology. He has written eight books and many articles on this work. His most recent publication is the second edition of his Theoretical Concepts in Physics, released in December 2003. His other interests include music, mountain walking (completing the Munros in 2011), art, architecture and golf. As of 2017 [update] he is the editor-in-chief of the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society [10] and has authored or co-authored biographies of John E. Baldwin, [13] Vitaly Ginzburg, [14] Brian Pippard, [15] Geoffrey Burbidge [16] and David J. C. MacKay. [17]
During his career, he supervised numerous PhD students including Jim Dunlop, [3] Stephen Gull, [2] Simon Lilly [4] and John Peacock. [2]
Longair has received numerous awards, including:
Since 1975, Longhair has been married to Deborah Howard, an architectural historian. Together they have two children. [19]
As of 2014 [update] he had published 298 papers. [8] [27]
The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is part of the School of Physical Sciences. The laboratory was opened in 1874 on the New Museums Site as a laboratory for experimental physics and is named after the British chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish. The laboratory has had a huge influence on research in the disciplines of physics and biology.
Antony Hewish was a British radio astronomer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 for his role in the discovery of pulsars. He was also awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969.
Sir Martin Ryle was an English radio astronomer who developed revolutionary radio telescope systems and used them for accurate location and imaging of weak radio sources. In 1946 Ryle and Derek Vonberg were the first people to publish interferometric astronomical measurements at radio wavelengths. With improved equipment, Ryle observed the most distant known galaxies in the universe at that time. He was the first Professor of Radio Astronomy in the University of Cambridge and founding director of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory. He was the twelfth Astronomer Royal from 1972 to 1982. Ryle and Antony Hewish shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974, the first Nobel prize awarded in recognition of astronomical research. In the 1970s, Ryle turned the greater part of his attention from astronomy to social and political issues which he considered to be more urgent.
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, was a Scottish physicist and meteorologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the cloud chamber.
Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge (24 September 1925 – 26 January 2010) was an English astronomy professor and theoretical astrophysicist, most recently at the University of California, San Diego. He was married to astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge and was the second author of the influential B2FH paper which she led.
Ronald George Wreyford Norrish FRS was a British chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967.
David Mervyn Blow was an influential British biophysicist. He was best known for the development of X-ray crystallography, a technique used to determine the molecular structures of tens of thousands of biological molecules. This has been extremely important to the pharmaceutical industry.
Sir Franz Arthur Friedrich Schuster was a German-born British physicist known for his work in spectroscopy, electrochemistry, optics, X-radiography and the application of harmonic analysis to physics. Schuster's integral is named after him. He contributed to making the University of Manchester a centre for the study of physics.
Roger Arthur Cowley, FRS, FRSE, FInstP was an English physicist who specialised in the excitations of solids.
Sir Alfred Brian Pippard, FRS, was a British physicist. He was Cavendish Professor of Physics from 1971 until 1982 and an Honorary Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, of which he was the first President.
Edmund Clifton Stoner FRS was a British theoretical physicist. He is principally known for his work on the origin and nature of itinerant ferromagnetism, including the collective electron theory of ferromagnetism and the Stoner criterion for ferromagnetism. Stoner made significant contributions to the electron configurations in the periodic table.
The Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester is one of the largest and most active physics departments in the UK, taking around 250 new undergraduates and 50 postgraduates each year, and employing more than 80 members of academic staff and over 100 research fellows and associates. The department is based on two sites: the Schuster Laboratory on Brunswick Street and the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in Cheshire, international headquarters of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
Norman Feather FRS FRSE PRSE, was an English nuclear physicist. Feather and Egon Bretscher were working at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge in 1940, when they proposed that the 239 isotope of element 94 (plutonium) would be better able to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. This research, a breakthrough, was part of the Tube Alloys project, the secret British project during World War II to develop nuclear weapons.
Harold Albert Wilson FRS was an English physicist.
Sir Alan Hugh Cook FRS was an English physicist who specialised in geophysics, astrophysics and particularly precision measurement.
Alan Carrington CBE, FRS was a British chemist and one of the leading spectroscopists in Britain in the late twentieth century.
Prof Ian Naismith Sneddon FRS FRSE FIMA OBE was a Scottish mathematician who worked on analysis and applied mathematics.
Richard Edwin Hills was a British astronomer who was emeritus professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Cambridge.
The Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh is awarded by the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine to a person who has made any highly important and valuable addition to practical therapeutics in the previous five years. The prize, which may be awarded biennially, was founded in 1878 by Andrew Robertson Cameron of Richmond, New South Wales, with a sum of £2,000. The University's senatus academicus may require the prizewinner to deliver one or more lectures or to publish an account on the addition made to practical therapeutics. A list of recipients of the prize dates back to 1879.
David W. Green was a crystallographer at the Medical Research Council Unit for the Study of the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge.
"All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." -- "Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 25 September 2015. Retrieved 9 March 2016.{{cite web}}
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Prof M.S. Longair, astronomer, 70
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