David Shoenberg
David Shoenberg, MBE FRS, was a British physicist.
David Shoenberg was born in 1911, the son of Isaac Shoenberg. Isaac came to Britain and acquired British nationality, but then returned to Russia where David was born. David was, however, a British citizen, and was brought to Britain as a boy. He was educated at Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his doctorate in 1935.
He began his research into aspects of low-temperature physics and magnetism at the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge. After the war he played a leading role in re-establishing low-temperature physics at Cambridge, becoming head of the Mond Laboratory in 1947. He remained in this post until 1973. He was Professor of Physics, Cambridge University and Head of Low Temperature Physics Group, Cavendish Laboratory, 1973–78, then Professor Emeritus. He was also a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
He received the MBE in 1944. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1953 and was awarded their Hughes Medal in 1995 "for his work on the electronic structure of solids, in particular by exploiting low temperature techniques, particularly the De Haas Van Alphen effect".
His monograph Superconductivity is an excellent overview of the first few decades of research on superconductivity.
He won the Fritz London Memorial Prize for Low-Temperature Physics in 1964.
He had married Catherine Felicitee Fischmann in 1940; they had a son and two daughters.
