George Paget Thomson

Sir George Paget Thomson, FRS^[1] (/ˈtɒmsən/; 3 May 1892 – 10 September 1975) was a British physicist and Nobel laureate in physics recognized for his discovery of the wave properties of the electron by electron diffraction.^[2][3]

Education and early life

Thomson was born in

Career

After the war, Thomson became a

Thomson stayed at Imperial College until 1952, when he became Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 1964, the college honoured his tenure with the George Thomson Building, a work of modernist architecture on the college's Leckhampton campus.

Awards and honours

In addition to winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, Thomson was knighted in 1943. He gave the address "Two aspects of science" as president of the British Association for 1959–1960.^[5]

Personal life

In 1924, Thomson married Kathleen Buchanan Smith, daughter of the Very Rev. Sir George Adam Smith, the Principal of the University of Aberdeen. They had two sons and two daughters. Kathleen died in 1941.^[6]

Thomson died on 10 September 1975, at Cambridge, aged 83, and is buried with his wife in Grantchester parish churchyard to the south of Cambridge.

One of their sons, Sir John Thomson (1927–2018), became a senior diplomat who served as High Commissioner to India (1977–82) and Permanent Representative to the United Nations (1982–87). Their grandson Sir Adam Thomson (born 1955) also became a senior diplomat, serving as High Commissioner to Pakistan (2010–2013) and as Permanent Representative to NATO (2014–2016). One daughter, Lillian Clare Thomson, married the South African economist and mountaineer Johannes de Villiers Graaff.^[7]

See also

• Matter wave
• Pinch (plasma physics)
• Z-pinch

References