Professor George Paget Thomson, c mid-20th century

Sir George Paget Thomson, 3 May 1892 - 10 September 1975, was an English physicist who was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for his experimental discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals, in conjunction with Clinton Davisson who had made the same discovery independently. Thomson was the son of Nobel laureate J. J. Thomson, and studied mathematics and physics at Trinity College, Cambridge. With the outbreak of WWI, in 1914, he was commissioned to the Queen's Royal West Surrey Regiment. In 1915, he then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and researched aerodynamics. He remained a commissioned captain until 1920. After WWI, Thomson became a Fellow at Cambridge and then also worked at the University of Aberdeen. He further worked at Cornell University, Imperial College London. Thomson married Kathleen Buchanan Smith, daughter of the Principal of University of Aberdeen. They had two sons and two daughters. During WWII, he worked on nuclear physics and their military applications. He was chairman of the MAUD committee that determined an atomic bomb was possible. He worked at Cambridge as Master of Corpus Christi College until his retirement. Thomson was knighted in 1943. Thomson died in 1975, aged 83. As well as winning the Nobel Prize, he also was awarded the Hughes Medal (1939), the Royal Medal (1949) and the Faraday Medal (1960).