Robert Cahn
| Robert Cahn | |
|---|---|
| Born | Robert Wolfgang Cahn September 9, 1924 |
| Died | April 9, 2007 (aged 82) |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge |
| Doctoral advisor | Egon Orowan |
| Notable awards | FRS |
Robert Wolfgang Cahn FRS (9 September 1924 – 9 April 2007) was a British metallurgist whose contributions to physical metallurgy centred on the properties of dislocations. Cahn developed a successful model for the nucleation of recrystallization, which underpinned research into industrial processes involving high-temperature deformation. He also contributed substantially to the crystallography of uranium. In later life he made a great contribution to scientific editing, editing both scientific textbooks such as the comprehensive Physical Metallurgy, co-edited, with Peter Haasen, a standard reference work in the field.
Cahn was born to an affluent Jewish family in Fürth, in northern Bavaria, Germany, on 9 September 1924. His turbulent childhood undoubtedly had an influence on the determination with which he approached his professional life, "his legendary impatience", and his wide cultural interests.
Cahn’s father, Martin Cahn, came from a religious, but assimilated, Jewish family which had included successive heads of Jewish communities in small settlements in Baden. He worked as an accountant for the mirror factory of Robert’s maternal grandfather, Hugo Heinemann. Young Robert was raised in a flat in the centre of Fürth, and for three years in a modernist style house on the outskirts. In July 1933, his father’s marriage to Else being on the point of collapse and the children having been persecuted on account of their being Jewish, the family fled to Switzerland from where Robert went with his mother and grandfather to Majorca and Martin to London to establish a new business. Cahn joined his father in London in 1936 and was introduced to the musical soirées and cultural circle of friends his father had developed.
Sent by his father to Maiden Erlegh House School at Earley, Berkshire, a school with absolutely no academic pretensions, he was left largely to his own devices. At the age of fifteen he moved to the Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School at Cricklewood, but took himself out of the school in 1940. Following a brief interlude in London, he escaped the Blitz to Workington, Cumbria where he had two years of excellent teaching at the local technical school and discovered a lifelong passion for mountain walking.
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