William Cochran (physicist)

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For other people named William Cochran, see William Cochran (disambiguation).

William Cochran

FRSE
Alma materUniversity of Edinburgh
Known forX-ray crystallography
Awards
Hughes Medal

1978
Scientific career
Fields
Arnold Beevers
Doctoral students

William (Bill) Cochran

FRSE (30 July 1922 – 28 August 2003)[1] was a Scottish physicist. He is best known for "pioneering contributions to the science of X-ray crystallography", for which he was awarded the Hughes Medal in 1978.[2][3]

Biography

Bill Cochran was born in

Arnold Beevers in the Chemistry Department in X-ray crystallography of sucrose using isomorphous replacement. He moved to the University of Cambridge to work with Lawrence Bragg, and obtained tenure in 1951. He realised that isomorphous replacement was the key to solving protein structures. With Francis Crick, he invented methods for deducing helical patterns from crystallographic data, which ultimately led to the solution of the structure of DNA.[citation needed
]

Cochran went on to study

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman
and Negundagi with the original idea. Cochran's basic idea is that on cooling from a high temperature state, symmetry breaking can occur.

Cochran returned to Edinburgh in 1964 as Chair of

Natural Philosophy. His monograph The Dynamics of Atoms in Crystals was published in 1973.[4] He became Head of Department in 1975 and was instrumental in the merger of the Natural Philosophy and Mathematical Physics departments. He was vice-principal
from 1984 to 1987.

Cochran also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1992.[5]

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in March 1962 and won their Hughes Medal in 1978.[6] He won the Howard N. Potts Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1985.[2]

Cochran died from

motor neurone disease in 2003.[7]

References

  1. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2005.0005
    .
  2. ^ a b "William Cochran". The Franklin Institute. Retrieved 12 December 2023.
  3. S2CID 216085372
    .
  4. doi:10.1063/1.3128993
    .
  5. ^ "Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh: Honorary Graduates". www1.hw.ac.uk. Retrieved 5 April 2016.
  6. ^ "Library and Archive Catalogue". Royal Society. Retrieved 23 December 2010.
  7. ^ "William Cochran Obituary 2003".

External links

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