Wilfrid Basil Mann

Add links
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Portrait of Wilfrid Basil Mann from the 1930s at his time in Copenhagen

Wilfrid Basil Mann (4 August 1908 – 29 March 2001) was a

metrologist.[1]

He was born in

Imperial College of Science and Technology
in London in 1937. He did graduate work during the 1930s in
radioisotope gallium-67,[2] which is still in use in nuclear medicine
.

His mentor at Imperial College was George Paget Thomson the British physicist in charge of the Tube Alloys project during the war years (the British nuclear program that was later incorporated into the Manhattan Project). He had Mann assigned to the British Embassy in

National Bureau of Standards
(NBS) as the head of the Radioactivity Section. For the next 30 years Wilfrid Mann was the most influential radionuclide metrologist in the world.

During the early 1950s, he had a keen interest in the national standards for radium-226 and undertook microcalorimetric experiments to intercompare the national standards (Hönigschmid standards) of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany. He retired from NBS in 1980.

Mann was obliged to deny claims that he was a member of the

investigative journalist Andrew Boyle's book Climate of Treason.[4] In his memoirs, Mann argued using contemporary correspondence, publications, and verified passport entries that he was incapable of having worked with Donald Maclean in the British Embassy. As part of his hiring at the Bureau of Standards, Mann underwent intense security screening and received a top-level "Q" clearance from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.[5]

Mann died in Towson, Maryland in 2001.

Books

Mann's several texts include Radioactivity and Its Measurement, 1980 (Mann, Ayres, and Garfinkel), A Handbook of Radioactivity Measurements Procedures, NCRP Report 58, 1985 edition, and Radioactivity Measurements: Principles and Practice, 1988 (Mann, Rytz, and Spernol).

Notes

  1. doi:10.1063/1.1420572
    .
  2. ^ Physical Review 54, 649, 1938)
  3. ^ "Sixth member of Cambridge Spy Ring revealed".
  4. ^ "'The Fifth Man': The Cambridge Spy Ring and Wilfred Mann". NIST. 27 September 2016. Retrieved 6 September 2021.
  5. ^ Lemann, Nicholas (21 November 1979). "Ex-Spy Admits an 'Appalling Mistake'". Washington Post. Retrieved 6 September 2021.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wilfrid_Basil_Mann&oldid=1182360757"