Nishikawa Shōji

Nishikawa Shōji ( Japanese 西川 正治 ; * December 5, 1884 in Hachiōji , Japan ; † January 5, 1952 ) was a Japanese physicist and Japan's first important crystallographer .

Life

Nishikawa Shōji was born in 1884 as the son of a major silk trader in Hachiōji in Tokyo Prefecture . He grew up in Tokyo, where he later studied at the natural science faculty of the Imperial University of Tokyo . After initial research on radioactivity - inspired by Professor Terada Torahiko  - his interest turned to crystallography, which experienced a worldwide boom with the then new method of X-ray diffraction for structural analysis. First publications appeared by Nishikawa Shōji between 1913 and 1915, at a time when the British Nobel Prize winners in physics William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg were pioneering in this field.

Between 1916 and 1919 he stayed in the United States at Cornell University , where he worked with Ralph Wyckoff , among others . Before returning to Japan in 1920, he spent half a year with WH Bragg at University College London . He then headed the first research group at RIKEN and worked at the research institute until 1949. In 1924 he became a professor at the University of Tokyo, where he worked until his retirement in 1945.

Among his students was one Kikuchi Seishi , in 1928, named after him, in the electron diffraction occurring Kikuchi lines described. The significant contributions of Nishikawa Shōji include the analysis of the α-β phase transition of quartz and the experimental proof of deviations from Friedel's law for certain crystal structures. In 1950 he was a co-founder and first president of the Crystallographic Society of Japan .

Nishikawa Shōji was married to the teacher Ayai Kiku, they had four sons and a daughter. Two sons later also became physicists, the first-born Nishikawa Tetsuji was one of the founding fathers of the Japanese Research Center for High Energy Physics KEK and its general director from 1977 to 1989 and Nishikawa Kyōji was a professor at the University of Hiroshima and is still there as professor emeritus scientific advisor.

Awards

• 1937: Member of the Japanese Academy of Sciences
• 1951: Japanese Cultural Order
• 1951: First honorary citizen of the city of Hachiōji

literature

• S. Noma (Ed.): Nishikawa Shōji . In: Japan. An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, 1993, ISBN 4-06-205938-X , p. 1099.
• I. Nitta: Shoji Nishikawa 1884-1952. In: PP Ewald (Ed.) Fifty Years of X-Ray Diffraction. International Union of Crystallography , 1962, pp. 328-334; iucr.org (PDF); Reprint: Springer, 2012, ISBN 978-1-4615-9963-0 ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 西川 正治 . In: デ ジ タ ル 版 日本人 名 大 辞典 + Plus at kotobank.jp. Retrieved May 6, 2014 (Japanese). 
2. ↑ ^{a b c} I. Nitta: Shoji Nishikawa 1884-1952. In: PP Ewald (Ed.) Fifty Years of X-Ray Diffraction. International Union of Crystallography, 1962, pp. 328-334.
3. ^ ^{A b} André Authier: Early Days of X-ray Crystallography. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-965984-5 , pp. 136 f.
4. ↑ Shoji Nishikawa, Seishi Kikuchi: The Diffraction of Cathode Rays by Calcite . In: Proceedings of the Imperial Academy . Vol. 4, 1928, pp. 475-477 .
5. ↑ Shoji Nishikawa, Seishi Kikuchi: Diffraction of Cathode Rays by Mica . In: Nature . Vol. 121, June 30, 1928, pp. 1019-1020 , doi : 10.1038 / 1211019a0 .
6. ^ Special and Academic Advisers. ( Memento of the original from May 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Hiroshima University. Retrieved May 8, 2014. 
7. ^ Deceased Members: N. The Japan Academy; accessed on May 6, 2014.
8. ↑ 文化 勲 章 受 章 者 一 覧 ( Memento of the original from September 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . List of holders of the Japanese Order of Culture 1937–2012. Retrieved May 6, 2014 (Japanese). 
9. ↑ 八 王子 市 の 概要 ( Memento of the original from July 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Official website of the city of Hachiōji; Retrieved May 6, 2014 (Japanese). 

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Nishikawa is the family name, Shōji the first name.