Sir William Hunter McCrea, mathematician, physicist and astronomer, 1904-1999

William Hunter McCrea was born on 13 December 1904 in Dublin but moved to Chesterfield, Derbyshire before he was three. Here he was educated at the Central (elementary) School and the Grammar School, from which he won an entrance scholarship in Mathematics to Trinity College, Cambridge. He read for the Mathematical Tripos, becoming a Wrangler 1926, and after graduating began research with R.H. Fowler.

Recognition came early with a Cambridge University Rayleigh Prize, a Trinity College Rouse Ball Senior Studentship, a Sheepshanks Exhibition and an Isaac Newton Studentship. After spending the year 1928-1929 at Göttingen University he moved to a succession of academic appointments: Lecturer in the Mathematics Department at Edinburgh University (headed by E.T. Whittaker) in 1930, Reader at Imperial College London in 1932 and Professor of Mathematics at Queen's University Belfast in 1936. In 1943 he was given leave from Belfast to undertake Operational Research in the Admiralty in the team led by P.M.S. Blackett and in 1944 he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at Royal Holloway University of London, an appointment he took up at the end of the war. McCrea remained at Royal Holloway until 1966 when he took up his last appointment as Science Research Council supported Research Professor of Theoretical Astronomy at the recently established Sussex University. McCrea and University Professor R.J. Tayler, with the support of the Astronomer Royal R.v.d.R. Woolley and other senior Royal Greenwich Observatory staff, effectively put Sussex on the world astronomy map.

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