1. Leon Mestel was a British-Australian astronomer and astrophysicist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Sussex.
13 Facts About Leon Mestel
1. 2.
Leon Mestel was awarded both the Eddington Medal and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Leon Mestel was born on 5 August 1927 in Melbourne, Australia to Solomon Mestel, a rabbi and Rachel, a schoolteacher and sister of Selig Brodetsky.
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Leon Mestel was educated at West Ham Secondary School, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained his BA in 1948 and his PhD in 1952.
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In 1982, as part of a memorial series of annual lectures at the University of Leeds commemorating his maternal uncle, Leon Mestel gave the 23rd Selig Brodetsky Memorial Lecture, titled Astronomy: A Mirror to Physics.
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At the time he was completing his PhD, Leon Mestel took a position as an ICI Research Fellow at the Department of Mathematics in the University of Leeds, carrying out research there in the three-year period from 1951 to 1954.
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Leon Mestel was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1977.
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Leon Mestel retired in 1992, becoming Emeritus Professor at Sussex.
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Those for whom Leon Mestel wrote obituaries and articles include Martin Schwarzschild, Roger John Tayler, William McCrea, Hermann Bondi, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and Thomas George Cowling.
10.
Leon Mestel contributed the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Selig Brodetsky.
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In 2002, Leon Mestel was an invited speaker at a conference held in Cardiff, Wales, in memory of Fred Hoyle.
12.
In 2004, together with John D Barrow, Mestel organised a Commemoration Meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society to mark 60 years since the death of Arthur Eddington, publishing a paper on Eddington later the same year.
13.
In 2009, Leon Mestel featured in Portraits of Astronomers, a book by Lucinda Douglas-Menzies with portraits of thirty-eight leading UK astronomers.