Arthur Wilson

Who was Arthur Wilson?

Arthur James Cochran Wilson, FRS was a Canadian crystallographer.

He was born in Springhill, Nova Scotia. He was educated at King's Collegiate School, Windsor, Nova Scotia and Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia where he was awarded a BSc in 1934 and an MSc in 1936. He then proceeded to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his first PhD in 1938 on the anomalous thermal behaviour of the ferro-electric Rochelle salt.

Awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship in 1937, he left MIT for St John's College, Cambridge and the Cavendish Laboratory in 1938. There he made accurate measurements of the thermal expansion of aluminium and lead and gained a second PhD in 1942, acquiring a lifelong interest in X-ray crystallography in the process. His interest was particularly stimulated by a research paper he was asked to review on deriving absolute from relative intensities of X-ray diffraction data which made him aware of the analytic power of crystallographic statistics. His book X-ray Optics, first published in 1949, is still a definitive work on the subject.