Tony Hilton Royle Skyrme | |
|---|---|
 Tony Skyrme in 1946 | |
| Born | (1922-12-05)5 December 1922 Lewisham, London, England |
| Died | 25 June 1987(1987-06-25) (aged 64) Birmingham, England, UK |
| Known for | Skyrmions |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Nuclear physics High-energy physics |
Tony Hilton Royle Skyrme (/skɜːrm/; 5 December 1922 – 25 June 1987) was aBritishphysicist who was born inLewisham.
He proposed modelling theeffective interaction betweennucleons innuclei by a zero-rangepotential.[1] This idea is still widely used today innuclear structure,[2] and inequations of state forneutron stars.[3]
Skyrme is perhaps best known for formulating the firsttopological soliton to model a particle, theskyrmion.[4] Some of his most important work can be found in his selected papers.[5][6] Skyrme was awarded theHughes Medal by theRoyal Society in 1985.
Tony Skyrme was born inLewisham,London, the child of a bank clerk. He attended a boarding school in Lewisham and then won a scholarship toEton. He excelled atmathematics and won several prizes in the subject at the school, including theTomline Prize in 1939 and the Russell Prize in 1940. He went on toTrinity College,Cambridge, where he again excelled, passing part one of themathematical tripos as awrangler in 1942 and part three in 1943 (the other three students to graduate from Cambridge after completing part three that year wereFreeman Dyson,James Lighthill andFritz Ursell, all of whom, like Skyrme, receivedstarred first-class degrees[7]). While there he was president of TheArchimedeans mathematics society.[8][9][10]
WithWorld War Two at its height after graduation he was drafted into war work as a mathematician underRudolf Peierls who was leading a team working on the theoretical aspects ofatomic energy, particularly as applied toatomic 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 theManhattan project to build a nuclear weapon. Skyrme followed later in 1944, and worked on problems concerning the diffusion plant for isotope separation. He also usedIBM punch card tabulators to calculate the implosions needed to detonate aplutonium bomb. His war time work earned him afellowship at Oxford. But he followed Peierls to theUniversity of Birmingham where he became aresearch fellow. Theacademic years 1948–49 and 1949–50 were spent at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology and at theInstitute for Advanced Study inPrinceton, respectively. In 1949 he married Dorothy Mildred, a lecturer in experimental nuclear physics whom he had met at Birmingham University. They had no children.[8][9]
Returning to Britain both he and Dorothy gained posts at theAtomic Energy Research Establishment atHarwell from 1950 to 1962. From 1954 he was head of the group there for theoretical nuclear physics, in which among othersJohn Bell worked. Here he made two pioneering contributions to nuclear physics. One was to show how to handle short-range forces in athree-body problem. The other was a powerful approximation to nuclear forces, later widely used as the ‘Skyrme model’.[9][10]
In 1962 he proposed a mathematical treatment of fundamental particles, in which particles such asneutrons andprotons, that obey thePauli exclusion principle, appear as manifestations of fields such as that ofmesons. These entities would later in 1982 become known asSkyrmions. For this work Skyrme was awarded theHughes medal of theRoyal Society in 1985 but never received the full accolade of afellowship there.[10]
In 1958–59 he had travelled with his wife as tourists in a one-year overland circumnavigation of the globe by car andLand Rover. They fell in love with the lush tropical gardens ofMalaysia and decided to settle there. In 1962 they left Harwell and Skyrme took up a post in theUniversity of Malaya inKuala 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 ofMathematical Physics at theUniversity of Birmingham where he remained for the rest of his career.[9][10]
His hobbies werehome electronics – he built his owntelevision receiver andHi-Fi in the 1950s; and gardening, where he and Dorothy made an early attempt atself sufficiency.[10]
Skyrme died on 25 June 1987 in Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham, of anembolism after a routine operation.[9][10]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| People | |
| Other | |
