Denys Wilkinson

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

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

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. From 1944 to 1959, he was a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge.

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

In 1957 he went to the University of Oxford as Professor of Nuclear Physics. In 1959 he became Professor of Experimental Physics at Oxford, and from 1962 to 1976 was head of the Department of Nuclear Physics. While he held his professorship at Oxford, he was a Fellow (there called a Student) of Christ Church, Oxford. He was knighted in 1974. 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.

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

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

He is also notable for the invention of the Wilkinson Analog-to-Digital Converter, to support his experimental work.

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