William Fuller Brown Jr.

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William Fuller Brown Jr.
Born(1904-09-21)September 21, 1904
3M Company, University of Minnesota
Thesis The variation of the internal friction and elastic constants with magnetization in iron  (1937)
Doctoral advisorShirley Leon Quimby

William Fuller Brown Jr. (21 September 1904 – 12 December 1983) was an American physicist who developed the theory of micromagnetics, a continuum theory of ferromagnetism that has had numerous applications in physics and engineering. He published three books: Magnetostatic Principles in Ferromagnetism,[1] Micromagnetics,[2] and Magnetoelastic Interactions.[3]

Biography

William Fuller Brown Jr. was born in Lyon Mountain, New York on September 21, 1904 to William Fuller Brown and Mary Emily Williams, daughter of Hon. Andrew Williams.[4][5][6] An early interest in electromagnetism was stimulated by a toy motor but "destimulated" by high school and college physics courses.[7] He graduated from Cornell University with a BA in English in 1925 and began teaching at Carolina Academy, a private high school in Raleigh, North Carolina. Teaching general science "restimulated" his interest in physics.[7]

In 1927, Brown enrolled in

PhD in physics in 1937.[7]

In 1938 Brown was appointed assistant professor of physics at

U.S. Navy.[6]

From 1946 to 1955, Brown worked in Newton Square,

single-domain particles.[6]

In 1957 Brown became a professor of

Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart).[6] He died in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1983.[8]

Development of micromagnetics

At the time of Brown's graduation from Cornell, the theory for

magnetic domains was not very developed. Richard Becker and Werner Döring, in their book Ferromagnetismus,[9] emphasized internal stresses. Brown realized that the most important factor, magnetostatic forces, were "totally ignored". He was strongly influenced by the 1935 paper of Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, which developed a one-dimensional continuous model for domain wall motion. In 1938 W. C. Elmore published a paper that discussed a three-dimensional generalization of the Landau-Lifshitz theory, but did not attempt to derive the equations. Brown set out to do this.[10]

Brown published his equations in 1940 and applied them to the approach to saturation of magnetization curves.[11] He later said that "nobody paid any attention to them for 16 years",[7] although Charles Kittel said that it was one of the "starting points" for his review of ferromagnetism in 1946.[12]

Honors

In 1967, Brown received an A. Cressy Morrison Award from the

IEEE Magnetics Society. He was also elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1938[13] and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[6]

Works

Books

Articles

Notes

  1. ^ Brown 1962a
  2. ^ Brown 1962b
  3. ^ Brown 1966
  4. ^ Yale & Decennial
  5. ^ Anderson, Bart (1966). The Sharples--Sharpless Family. West Chester, PA. pp. 2:592.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  6. ^ a b c d e f Rubens 1979
  7. ^ a b c d Brown 1972
  8. ^ UMN 2003
  9. ^ Becker & Döring 1939
  10. ^ Brown 1978
  11. ^ Brown 1940
  12. ^ Kittel 1946
  13. ^ "APS Fellow Archive".

See also

References

External links

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