William McCrea (astronomer)

Sir William Hunter McCrea FRS FRSE PRAS (13 December 1904 – 25 April 1999) was an English astronomer and mathematician.

He was born in Dublin in Ireland on 13 December 1904.

His family moved to Kent in 1906 and then to Derbyshire where he attended Chesterfield Grammar School. His father was a school master at Netherthorpe Grammar School in Staveley. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1923 where he studied Mathematics, later gaining a PhD in 1929 under Ralph H. Fowler.

From 1930 he lectured in Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. During his time in Edinburgh (in 1931) he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker, Sir Charles Galton Darwin, Edward Copson and Charles Glover Barkla. He won the Society's Keith Medal (jointly with Edward Copson) for the period 1939-41.

In 1932 he moved to Imperial College London as a Reader. In 1936 he became Professor of Mathematics and head of the mathematics department at the Queen's University of Belfast.