彼得·B·赫希1925—2025

生平

彼得爵士毕业于Sloane School以及剑桥大学圣凯瑟琳学院。1946年他加入卡文迪许实验室的晶体部门。他的博士指导教授为W. H. Taylor 和Lawrence Bragg，论文研究对煤炭结构的分析做出了重要贡献。

在1950年代他创新地将透射电子显微镜 (TEM)应用于金属，发展了详细的扫描技术理论。在1965年他和Archibald Howie, M.J. Whelan, Pashley and Nicholson,发表了透过电子显微镜来分析晶体缺陷的文章。

后来彼得爵士在牛津大学材料系担任Issac Wolfson冶金讲席教授直到1992年退休，他总共担任牛津材料系系主任共26年(1966~1992)。

因为他促进电子显微镜的发展，以研究晶体物质的结构，以及透过差排动力学模拟材料韧脆转换和塑性变形。彼得爵士于2005年当选美国国家工程院院士(外籍)，1983年获沃尔夫物理学奖。1963年当选皇家学会院士，1975年封为骑士。彼得爵士也是牛津大学圣艾德蒙学堂成员之一。

彼得爵士于100岁高龄在2025年9月12日逝世。

Sir Peter Bernhard Hirsch (16 January 1925 – 12 September 2025) was a British metallurgist who made fundamental contributions to the application of transmission electron microscopy to metals.

Life and career

Hirsch was born in Berlin on 16 January 1925; his parents divorced in 1934 and his father died two years later. Hirsch lived in Germany until 1939; he was one of hundreds of Jewish children that escaped Germany via the various Kindertransport missions that saved many such children from the impending dangers of World War II and the Holocaust.

Hirsch attended Sloane Grammar School, Chelsea, and St Catharine's College, Cambridge. In 1946 he joined the Crystallography Department of the Cavendish to work for a PhD on work hardening in metals under W. H. Taylor and Lawrence Bragg. His doctoral research was funded by grants from the British Iron and Steel Research Association, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, and a junior research studentship from St Catharine's College.

He subsequently carried out work, which is still cited, on the structure of coal, funded by the National Coal Board and a University of Cambridge research fellowship.

In the mid-1950s, he pioneered the application of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to metals and developed in detail the theory needed to interpret such images. He was a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge from 1960 to 1966 and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Christ's in 1978. In 1965, with Howie, Whelan, Pashley and Nicholson, he published the text Electron microscopy of thin crystals. The following year he moved to Oxford to take up the Isaac Wolfson Chair in Metallurgy, succeeding William Hume-Rothery, and was elected a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He held this chair until his retirement in 1992, building up the Department of Metallurgy (now the Department of Materials) into a world-renowned centre. Among many other honours, he was awarded the 1983 Wolf Foundation Prize in physics. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1963 and knighted in 1975.

Hirsch was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for experimentally establishing the role of dislocations in plastic flow and of electron microscopy as a tool for materials research. His great-niece is the writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch.

In March 2025, the University of Oxford department of materials held a symposium in honour of Hirsch, to mark his 100th birthday. Hirsch died after a brief illness on 12 September 2025, at the age of 100.