Peter Hirsch
Sir Peter Bernhard Hirsch HonFRMS FRS is a figure in British materials science who has made fundamental contributions to the application of transmission electron microscopy to metals. Hirsch attended the Sloane School, Chelsea and St Catharine's College, Cambridge. In 1946 he joined the Crystallography Department of the Cavendish to work for a PhD on work hardening in metals under W.H. Taylor and Lawrence Bragg. He subsequently carried out work, which is still cited, on the structure of coal.
In the mid-1950s he pioneered the application of transmission electron microscopy to metals and developed in detail the theory needed to interpret such images. He was a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge from 1960 to 1966 and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Christ's in 1978. In 1965, with Howie, Whelan, Pashley and Nicholson, he published the text Electron microscopy of thin crystals. The following year he moved to Oxford to take up the Isaac Wolfson Chair in Metallurgy, succeeding William Hume-Rothery. He held this post until his retirement in 1992, building up the Department of Metallurgy into a world-renowned centre. Among many other honours, he was awarded the 1983 Wolf Foundation Prize in physics. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1963 and knighted in 1975. He is a fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
