Denys Wilkinson

Sir Denys Haigh Wilkinson FRS (5 September 1922 – 22 April 2016) was a British nuclear physicist.

The Denys Wilkinson Building, part of the Department of Physics at Oxford University.

He was born on 5 September 1922 in Leeds, Yorkshire and educated at Loughborough Grammar School and Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating in 1943.[1]

After wartime work on the British and Canadian Atomic Energy projects, he returned to Cambridge in 1946, where he was awarded a PhD in 1947 and held posts culminating as Reader in Nuclear Physics from 1956–1957.[1] From 1944 to 1959, he was a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge.[1]

He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1956.[2]

In 1957 he went to the University of Oxford as Professor of Nuclear Physics, and won the Fernand Holweck Medal and Prize the same year.[1] In 1959 he became Professor of Experimental Physics at Oxford, and from 1962 to 1976 was head of the Department of Nuclear Physics.[1] While he held his professorship at Oxford, he was a Fellow (there called a Student) of Christ Church, Oxford.[1] He was knighted in 1974.[3] In 2001 the Nuclear Physics Laboratory at the University of Oxford, which he had helped to create, was renamed the Denys Wilkinson Building in his honour.[4]

Denys Wilkinson served as chairman for both the Physics III Committee[5] and the Electronic Experiments Committee at CERN.[6]

On leaving Oxford, he served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex from 1976 to 1987.[1][7] After his retirement, he was appointed Emeritus Professor of Physics at Sussex in 1987.[1]

Denys Wilkinson's work in nuclear physics included investigation of the properties of nuclei with low numbers of nucleons.[2] He was amongst the first to experimentally test rules relating to isospin.[2] He also applied concepts from physics to the study of bird navigation.[2]

He is also notable for the invention of the Wilkinson analog-to-digital converter, to support his experimental work.[2]

He died on 22 April 2016 at the age of 93.[7]

His papers are held at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge.[1] He was an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge from 1961, and an Honorary Student of Christ Church, Oxford from 1979.[1] He won the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society in 1965 and the Royal Medal in 1980.[2][8][9] In 1980 he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Mathematics and Science at Uppsala University, Sweden.[10]