Alan Mackay

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Alan Mackay 2013

Alan Lindsay Mackay (born September 6, 1926 in Wolverhampton ) is a British physicist who specializes in solid-state physics and crystallography.

Life

Alan Lindsay Mackay was born to Robert L. Mackay, MC, MD, OBE, and Margaret Brown Mackay, b. McLellan, MB, Ch.B., OBE, born. Mackay studied from 1944 at Trinity College of the University of Cambridge mainly physics and graduated in 1947. He then spent two years as a scientist at Philips Electrical. In 1951 he received his doctorate at Birkbeck College in London with John Desmond Bernal with a thesis on X-ray structure analysis .

He stayed at Birkbeck College, where he became professor of crystallography in 1986 (in the same year he received his D.Sc.). In 2002 he became a Fellow of Birkbeck College.

Even after his retirement in 1991, he continued to work in scientific collaborations with India, Mexico and Korea. He is a member of the Mexican and Korean Academy of Sciences.

In 1988 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society . In 2010 he received the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize with Dov Levine and Paul Steinhardt for his pioneering work on quasicrystals .

Mackay is married with two sons and a daughter.

plant

He dealt with corrosion , crystallography, applications of electron microscopy . He became known as one of the pioneers in the study of quasicrystals in the early 1980s. His first work in this direction appeared in 1962, in which he showed how to pack spheres in an icosahedral arrangement. In 1981 he published an essay in Russian on the application of Penrose tiling in crystallography. and in 1982 he derived the associated diffraction patterns.

Mackay conducts research in what he calls Generalized Crystallography , which, beyond crystals from mineralogy and chemistry, also includes more complex structures from materials science and biology.

He proposed new structures for graphite materials, based on ideas for minimal surfaces with negative curvature. These generalize Buckminster fullerenes .

Fonts

  • A dictionary of scientific quotations , Taylor & Francis, 1991, ISBN 978-0750301060
  • with Eric A. Lord, S. Ranganathan New geometries for new materials , Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0521861045
  • Generalized Crystallography , Comp. & Maths. with Applications, Vol. 12 B, 1986, pp. 12-37
  • with Julyan HE Cartwright Beyond crystals: the dialectic of materials and information , Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A, Volume 370, 2012, pp. 2807-2822, Arxiv

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mackay A dense non-crystallographic packing of equal spheres , Acta Cryst., Vol. 15, 1962, p. 916
  2. ↑ Mackay De nive quinquangula , Krystallografiya, Volume 26, 1981, pp 910-918, the title alludes to the classic treatise by Johannes Kepler De nive sexangula to
  3. ^ Mackay Crystallography and the Penrose Pattern , Physica A, Volume 114, 1982, p. 609
  4. ^ Mackay, Humberto Terrones Diamond from Graphite , Nature, Volume 352, 1991, p. 762
  5. ^ Mackay, Terrones The geometry of Hypothetical Curved Graphite Structures , Carbon, Volume 30, 1992, p. 1251
personal data
SURNAME Mackay, Alan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mackay, Alan L .; Mackay, Alan Lindsay (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British physicist
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Wolverhampton