Marion Ross (physicist)
Marion Ross (born April 9, 1903 in Edinburgh , Scotland , † January 3, 1994 in Dunfermline , Scotland) was a Scottish physicist and university professor . She did research in the fields of nuclear physics , X-ray physics, hydrodynamics and acoustics .
life and work
Ross was the eldest of five daughters of organist and composer William Baird Ross and Marion Thomson. After graduating from Edinburgh Ladies College, she studied mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and graduated with honors. After studying for a year at Cambridge Teacher Training College and teaching math for two years at a secondary school in Woking, Surrey. In 1928 she became an assistant lecturer in the Department of Physics at the University of Edinburgh. For a year she worked under the direction of the then youngest Nobel Prize winner William Lawrence Bragg at the University of Manchester and together with Arnold Beevers researched the structure of the crystal beta aluminum oxide. They discovered ions in certain places that make this crystal an efficient superconductor . Years later it was discovered that the mobile sodium ions form excellent fast ion conductors that are very useful in battery technology. The locations of these ions are now known as the Beevers-Ross and Anti-Beevers-Ross sites. During World War II , she taught math for a year at Falkirk Technical School and then worked for four years with the Admiralty at the Naval Dockyards in Rosyth . She was the head of the research group underwater acoustics and hydrodynamics . In 1943 she did her doctorate at the University of Edinburgh under the Nobel Prize winner Charles Glover Barkla . After the war, at the invitation of Professor Norman Feather , she returned to the University of Edinburgh as a lecturer and in 1965 became the first director of the university's fluid dynamics department . Some of her research has been published in the journal Nature . Two years after the first female fellows were accepted, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1951 . When she retired, the Marion AS Ross Prize was founded, which is awarded annually to a student who has distinguished himself in classical physics shortly before the end of the final year of study. In 2014, a street on the campus of the University's Kings Buildings was named after her in her honor.
Publications (selection)
- CA Beevers, Μ a. S. Ross: The Crystal Structure of Beta Alumina Na2O11Al2O3, Zeitschrift für Kristallographie - Crystalline Materials, vol. 97, 1937.
- Marion a. S. Ross, Barbara Zajac: Range-Energy and other Relations for Electrons in Kodak Nuclear Plates, Nature, vol. 162, no 4128, 1948.
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ross, Marion |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Ross, Marion Amelia Spence |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Scottish physicist and university professor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 9, 1903 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Edinburgh , Scotland |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 3, 1994 |
| Place of death | Dunfermline , Scotland |