Tony Skyrme

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Tony Hilton Royle Skyrme
High-energy physics

Tony Hilton Royle Skyrme (/skɜːrm/; 5 December 1922 – 25 June 1987) was a British physicist who was born in Lewisham.

He proposed modelling the

equations of state for neutron stars.[3]

Skyrme is perhaps best known for formulating the first

topological soliton to model a particle, the skyrmion.[4] Some of his most important work can be found in his selected papers.[5][6] Skyrme was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society
in 1985.

Life

Tony Skyrme was born in

Archimedeans mathematics society.[7]
[8] [9]

With

atomic energy, particularly as applied to atomic weapons. At the end of 1943 Peierls and several other of the British scientists working on the atom, were transferred to the United States to assist in the Manhattan project to build a nuclear weapon. Skyrme followed later in 1944, and worked on problems concerning the diffusion plant for isotope separation. He also used IBM punch card tabulators to calculate the implosions needed to detonate a plutonium bomb. His war time work earned him a fellowship at Oxford. But he followed Peierls to the University of Birmingham where he became a research fellow. The academic years 1948–9 and 1949–50 were spent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, respectively. In 1949 he married Dorothy Mildred, a lecturer in experimental nuclear physics whom he had met at Birmingham University. Their marriage had no children.[7][8]

Returning to Britain both he and Dorothy gained posts at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell from 1950 to 1962. From 1954 he was head of the group there for theoretical nuclear physics, in which among others John Bell worked. Here he made two pioneering contributions to nuclear physics. One was to show how to handle short-range forces in a

Skyrme model’.[8][9]

In 1962 he proposed a mathematical treatment of fundamental particles, in which particles such as neutrons and protons, that obey the Pauli exclusion principle, appear as manifestations of fields such as that of mesons. These entities would later in 1982 become known as Skyrmions. For this work Skyrme was awarded the Hughes medal of the Royal Society in 1985 but never received the full accolade of a fellowship there.[9]

In 1958/59 he had travelled with his wife as tourists in a one-year overland circumnavigation of the globe by car and

Land Rover. They fell in love with the lush tropical gardens of Malaysia and decided to settle there. In 1962 they left Harwell and Skyrme took up a post in the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. He found this involved heavy lecturing commitments and was less than stimulating to his research work and by 1964 had returned to Britain to a post as professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Birmingham where he remained for the rest of his career.[8][9]

His hobbies were

self sufficiency.[9]

Skyrme died on 25 June 1987 in Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham, of an embolism after a routine operation.[8][9]

References

  1. doi:10.1016/0029-5582(58)90345-6
    .
  2. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.75.121
    .
  3. ISBN 978-0-387-33543-8
    .
  4. doi:10.1016/0029-5582(62)90775-7
    .
  5. ISBN 9789812795922
    . Retrieved 1 February 2016.
  6. ISBN 978-981-4502-43-6
  7. ^ a b R. H. Dalitz, ‘An outline of the life and work of Tony Skyrme’, International Journal of Modern Physics, A, 3 (1988), 2719–44 · The Times (3 July 1987) · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1987)
  8. ^ a b c d e Rudolf Peierls, ‘Skyrme, Tony Hilton Royle (1922–1987)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2007
  9. ^
    ISBN 9780191005336
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