P. R. Wallace
| P. R. Wallace | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
April 19, 1915 Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Died | March 20, 2006 (aged 90) Victoria, British Columbia, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Fields | Theoretical physics |
| Institutions |
University of Cincinnati MIT NRC (Can) McGill University Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France Concordia University |
| Alma mater | University of Toronto |
| Doctoral advisor | Leopold Infeld |
P. R. (Philip Russell; "Phil") Wallace (April 19, 1915 – March 20, 2006) was a Canadian theoretical physicist and long-time professor at McGill University. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (India). He had a distinguished career as educator, researcher, and activist in science and society, but he is increasingly well known for his pioneering paper in 1947 on the band structure of graphite, and particularly graphene, the subject of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Born in Toronto in 1915, Wallace entered the University of Toronto in 1933, achieving a B.A. in mathematics in 1937, an M.A. in 1938, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1940 under Leopold Infeld with a thesis on electromagnetism in general relativity. Advised by L. J. Synge, then head of the Applied Mathematics Department at Toronto, to hold himself ready for war work in Canada, Wallace took a two-year job at the University of Cincinnati and then moved to a lectureship at MIT. In 1943 he was recruited to join the British-Canadian Atomic Energy Project at the National Research Council of Canada's Montreal Laboratory. From 1943 to 1946 Wallace worked as one of an impressive group of theorists and mathematicians led by George Placzek on nuclear reactor fundamentals, including study of the effects on graphite and other materials of intense neutron and ion bombardment. His assignment to visit N. F. Mott in Bristol, England for several months to learn what was known about graphite led Wallace to a lifelong interest in graphite and a career in condensed matter physics, not least his 1947 paper on the band structure of graphite.
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