Scientist of the day - Sir William Lawrence Bragg

Sir William Lawrence Bragg

William Lawrence Bragg was an Australian-British physicist, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics at the age of 25 and is the youngest ever Nobel Laureate in Physics so far. He and his father, William Henry Bragg, shared the ‘Nobel Prize for Physics’ awarded in 1915 for their work involving x-ray crystallography. Although he was a talented and able individual from an early age, it was assumed that his father had produced the bulk of the work and then generously shared the prize with his son for assisting him. But it was he who had the key idea and the skill to interpret the diffraction patterns to prove it and his father had contributed primarily developing instruments for the experiment. The effect of this slighting on him would shadow him for the rest of his life. He served for British army in both the World Wars and later became a popular lecturer known for his skill in making science exciting for the students. He enjoyed his job as a professor and most reports indicate he found happiness at the Royal Institute for perhaps the first time in his life. The foundation laid by his work and that of others in x-ray crystallography helped scientists to discover the structures of DNA and RNA, thereby creating the field of molecular biology. 

Childhood & Early Life

• He was born on March 31, 1890 in Adelaide, South Australia to Sir William Henry Bragg, a physicist, and his wife Lady Gwendoline Bragg. His father was a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Adelaide.
• He was the eldest of the three children. He had a younger brother, Robert Charles Bragg, who was killed in 1915 at Gallipoli, and a younger sister, Gwendoline Bragg Caroe.
• He had a keen interest in science and received his early education from the Queens Preparatory School, North Adelaide and St. Peter's College, Adelaide. He was a bright student and graduated from high school in 1904, at the age of 14.
• Later he enrolled at the Adelaide University to study d mathematics, chemistry and physics. He graduated in 1908, at an age when most boys were still in secondary school.
• In 1909, he attended the Trinity College, Cambridge, England and received a major scholarship in mathematics but after one year, he transferred to physics course, at the suggestion of his father. He continued his academic success by taking first class honors in Natural Science in 1912.

   

  Major Works

  • His most significant accomplishment is the Bragg’s Law, which he discovered along with his father. Bragg's Law makes it possible to calculate the positions of the atoms within a crystal from the way an X-ray beam is diffracted by the crystal lattice.
  • In 1948, while in Cambridge, he became interested in the structure of proteins. Although he played no direct part in the 1953 discovery of DNA's structure, his X-ray method developed forty years ago was at the heart of this profound insight into the nature of life itself.

     

    Awards & Achievements

    • In 1915, he was awarded the ‘Nobel Prize for Physics’ jointly with his father for their work in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays, an important step in the development of X-ray crystallography. Until now, he is the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize, at an age of 25.
    • He was honored as the ‘Knight of the British Empire’ by King George VI in the 1941 New Year Honours.
    • He received the ‘Royal Medal’ in 1946 and the ‘Copley Medal’ in 1966, both from the Royal Society.
    • Since 1992, the Australian Institute of Physics has awarded the Bragg Gold Medal for Excellence in Physics to commemorate him and his father, for the best doctorate thesis by a student at an Australian university.

       

      Personal Life & Legacy

      • On 10 December 1921, he married Alice Grace Jenny Hopkinson who pursued a successful career in municipal affairs in Cambridge. They were blessed with four children; Stephen Lawrence, David William, Margaret Alice and Patience Mary.
      • He loved spending time reading literature and painting alongwith a lifelong interest in gardening. His other interest was shell collecting; his personal collection amounted to specimens from some 500 species; all personally collected from South Australia.
      • He died on July 1, 1971 at a hospital near his home at Waldringfield, Ipswich, Suffolk. He was buried in Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge University, England.

      
      

      Trivia

      When he was five, he fell from his tricycle and broke his arm. His father used the newly discovered X-rays to examine his arm. It was the first recorded surgical use of X-rays in Australia.

     

   

 

Scientist of the day - Alexander Grothendieck

 

Alexander Grothendieck

Alexander Grothendieck was a German-born French mathematician who made significant contributions to algebraic geometry. One of the pioneers in the field of modern algebraic geometry, he added elements of commutative algebra, homological algebra, sheaf theory and category theory to its foundations. Regarded as one of the greatest pure mathematicians of the second half of the 20th century, he reformulated algebraic geometry so as to enable geometric methods to be applied to problems in number theory. Born in Germany, he moved to France with his mother during the World War II. His early life was very difficult, and he spent several years in camps for people displaced during the war. As a refugee child, he attended a secondary school founded by local Protestant pacifists and anti-war activists. He became fascinated with mathematics and received his higher education from University of Montpellier and University of Nancy. Soon he embarked on a very productive career as a mathematician and became a leading expert in the theory of topological vector spaces. He was a brilliant mathematician who made major contributions to algebraic geometry, number theory, topology, category theory and complex analysis. However, he abandoned his thriving academic career in the 1970s and retired into obscurity a few years later. 

Childhood & Early Life

• Alexander Grothendieck was born on 28 March 1928 in Berlin, Germany to anarchist parents. His mother’s name was Johanna "Hanka" Grothendieck and she was married to the journalist Johannes Raddatz at the time of Alexander’s birth. However, Alexander’s biological father was Alexander "Sascha" Schapiro (also known as Alexander Tanaroff). His mother’s marriage to Johannes Raddatz ended in 1929.
• He lived with his parents till 1933 when his father moved to Paris to evade Nazism. His mother too followed suit, leaving behind her little son in the care of Wilhelm Heydorn, a Lutheran pastor and teacher.
• Alexander went to France during the World War II in 1939 and lived with his mother in various camps for displaced people. They spent the later years of the war in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, sheltered and hidden in local boarding houses. His father was killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942.
• He attended the Collège Cévenol (now known as the Le Collège-Lycée Cévenol International), a secondary school founded in 1938 by local Protestant pacifists and anti-war activists. It was at this school that he discovered his love for mathematics.
• After the war he studied mathematics at the University of Montpellier. Working on his own he rediscovered the Lebesgue measure, and conducted several independent studies over the next three years.
• In 1950 he moved to the University of Nancy where he wrote his dissertation under Laurent Schwartz and Jean Dieudonné in functional analysis and received his doctorate in 1953. By this time he had become a leading expert in the theory of topological vector spaces.
• From 1957 onwards, he shifted the focus of his studies to algebraic geometry and homological algebra.

  Major Works

  The most influential works of Alexander Grothendieck were in the field of algebraic geometry. His article, ‘Sur quelques points d'algèbre homologique’, also known as "Tôhoku paper" is considered to be one of his most important works. In this paper, he introduced abelian categories and applied their theory to show that sheaf cohomology can be defined as certain derived functors in this context.

  Personal Life & Legacy

  • Alexander Grothendieck was once married to a woman called Mireille Dufour and had three children with her.
  • He also had a son with his landlady during his time in Nancy and one child with a woman named Justine Skalba, with whom he lived in a commune in the early 1970s.
  • He became increasingly reclusive during the later years of his life. In 1991, Grothendieck moved to a new address which he shared with only a few of his contacts.
  • He died in the hospital of Saint-Girons, Ariège, on 13 November 2014, aged 86. At the time of his death, it was revealed that he had been living alone.