William Samson

Not to be confused with .

William Byars Samson (born 1943, in Forfar) is a Scottish astronomer, academic, computer scientist and a researcher in the fields of Astronomy, Databases, Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Life.

Will Samson graduated with a degree in mathematics from University of St. Andrews in 1966. He earned his PhD in Astronomy in 1971 from the University of Edinburgh. In 1976, Samson went on to study at Heriot-Watt University where he obtained his MSc in Computer Science."

William Samson's earliest fascination with the skies came when he was seven years old and his mother took him outside to point out great winter constellations like the Plough and Orion. Another inspiration was his music teacher at Forfar Academy, Willie Bernard, who took the class on a trip to the Mills Observatory. "He did that when he got fed up trying to teach us to sing."

Bill then aged 12 went back home with great fascination of the celestial constellations and built his first telescope using old spectacle lenses scrounged from an optician in Forfar, that he put into a cardboard tube. According to Samson, "It wasn’t wonderful, but good enough to see craters on the moon." He then went on to build his second and third telescopes from kits. The fourth one he built from scratch by grinding a disc of plate glass to make a mirror.

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