Brian Pippard (1920-2008)

摘要

Brian Pippard, who died on 21 September, had many achievements, but will be remembered particularly as the first experimenter to map the Fermi surface of a metal, for his non-local theories of the response of normal metals and superconductors to electric fields, and as dynamic head of physics at the University of Cambridge from 1971 to 1982. Pippard grew up in Bristol, UK, and at school proved exceptional in music as well as science. He entered Clare College, Cambridge, in 1938, and, doubting his mathematical ability, chose first to study chemistry, before switching to physics to make himself useful during the Second World War. He worked at the Great Malvern research establishment on a radar device for tracking mortar projectiles, returning to Cambridge for his PhD in 1945.