12 Facts About Tony Skyrme

Tony Hilton Royle Skyrme was a British physicist who was born in Lewisham.

Tony Skyrme proposed modelling the effective interaction between nucleons in nuclei by a zero-range potential.

Tony Skyrme was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society in 1985.

Tony Skyrme was born in Lewisham, London, the child of a bank clerk.

Tony Skyrme attended a boarding school in Lewisham and then won a scholarship to Eton.

Tony Skyrme excelled at mathematics and won several prizes in the subject at the school, including the Tomline Prize in 1939 and the Russell Prize in 1940.

Tony Skyrme went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he again excelled, he passed part one of the mathematical tripos as a wrangler in 1942, and part three in 1943 with a first class degree.

Tony Skyrme followed later in 1944, and worked on problems concerning the diffusion plant for isotope separation.

Tony Skyrme used IBM punch card tabulators to calculate the implosions needed to detonate a plutonium bomb.

In 1962 they left Harwell and Tony Skyrme took up a post in the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur.

Tony Skyrme found this involved heavy lecturing commitments and was less than stimulating to his research work and by 1964 had returned to Britain to a post as professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Birmingham where he remained for the rest of his career.

Tony Skyrme died on 25 June 1987 in Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham, of an embolism after a routine operation.