Skyrme, Tony Hilton Royle, 1922-1987

Professor Tony Hilton Royle Skyrme, 1922-1987, was educated at Eton (a King's Scholar) and Trinity College Cambridge where he studied for the Mathematical Tripos. After his final Cambridge examinations in 1943 he was assigned to work with the Tube Alloys Directorate (the UK atomic bomb project) and joined Rudolf Ernst Peierls', (later Sir Rudolph Peierls) group at University of Birmingham which was working on theoretical questions posed by the bomb's design and construction. In March 1944 he was sent to the United States of America to work first in New York and then at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb project.

On his return to England in 1946 Skyrme was admitted as a research fellow at Trinity College Cambridge although he never actually lived there, choosing instead to work at the new Department of Mathematical Physics at University of Birmingham where he held a university research fellowship 1946-1948. In August 1948 he married Dorothy Millest, a lecturer in nuclear physics at Birmingham, and then spent two years in the USA as a Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in the following year as a member of the the Institute of Advanced Physics at Princeton.

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