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Peter Hirsch

For the Danish ice hockey player, see Peter Hirsch (ice hockey)

Sir Peter Hirsch (born January 16, 1925) is a leading figure in British materials science who has made fundamental contributions to the application of transmission electron microscopy to metals. He attended the Sloane School, Chelsea and St Catharine's College, Cambridge. In 1946 joined the Crystallography Department of the Cavendish to work for a PhD on work hardening in metals under Lawrence Bragg. He subsequently carried out important work, which is still cited, on the structure of coal. In the mid 1950s he pioneered the application of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to metals, and developed in detail the theory needed to interpret such images. In 1965, with Howie, Whelan, Pashley and Nicholson, he published the seminal text “Electron microscopy of thin crystals”. The following year he moved to Oxford to take up the Isaac Wolfson Chair in Metallurgy, succeeding William Hume-Rothery. He held this post until his retirement in 1992, building up the Department of Metallurgy (now the Department of Materials) into a world-renowned centre. Among many other honours, he was awarded the 1983 Wolf Foundation Prize in physics. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1963, and knighted in 1975. He is a fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

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Chien-Shiung Wu (1978) • George Uhlenbeck / Giuseppe Occhialini (1979) • Michael Fisher / Leo Kadanoff / Kenneth G. Wilson (1980) • Freeman Dyson / Gerardus 't Hooft / Victor Weisskopf (1981) • Leon M. Lederman / Martin Lewis Perl (1982) • Erwin Hahn / Peter Hirsch / Theodore Maiman (1983) • Conyers Herring / Philippe Nozieres (1984) • Mitchell Feigenbaum / Albert J. Libchaber (1986) • Herbert Friedman / Bruno Rossi / Riccardo Giacconi (1987) • Roger Penrose / Stephen Hawking (1988) • Pierre-Gilles de Gennes / David J. Thouless (1990) • Maurice Goldhaber / Valentine Telegdi (1991) • Joseph H. Taylor, Jr. (1992) • Benoît Mandelbrot (1993) • Vitaly Ginzburg / Yoichiro Nambu (1994) • John Wheeler (1997) • Yakir Aharonov / Michael Berry (1998) • Dan Shechtman (1999) • Raymond Davis, Jr. / Masatoshi Koshiba (2000) • Bertrand Halperin / Anthony Leggett (2002) • Robert Brout / François Englert / Peter Higgs (2004) • Daniel Kleppner (2005) • Albert Fert / Peter Grünberg (2006)