Thompson, William

Epithet: of Add MS 34580

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000001344.0x000146

Epithet: MP

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000001344.0x000141

Epithet: of Cork, political economist

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000000209.0x0002cb

Epithet: MP; Lord Mayor of London 1829

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000001344.0x000143

Epithet: of Add MS 4319

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000001344.0x000148

Epithet: of Lytchett Minster

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000001344.0x00014a

Epithet: witness of Wolley Ch xi.103

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000001084.0x0000fd

Epithet: Collector of Coal Duties at Workington

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000001344.0x000140

Epithet: tallow-chandler, of London

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000001344.0x00014c

Epithet: Governor of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in New England

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000001344.0x00015c

Biography

William Bell Thompson was born February 27, 1922, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was trained at Canadian universities, receiving his B.A. in physics and mathematics in 1944 and his M.A. in physics in 1947 from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. In 1950 he received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Toronto, Ontario, and went to England to take up an appointment as Senior Fellow in the Theoretical Physics Division at Harwell, the laboratory of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. When a separate facility, Culham Laboratory, was set up for fusion studies, Thompson moved there and remained until his election to the Chair of Theoretical Plasma Physics at Oxford University in 1963.

Thompson first came to the University of California, San Diego, in 1961 as a visiting professor from Culham. In 1965 he was invited to join the new San Diego campus as a founding member of the Physics Department. He spent the next twenty-five years at UCSD, combining research, supervision of doctoral research, teaching, and administrative responsibilities; he was chairman of the department from 1969 to 1972. He retired in 1990.

Thompson's career focused on the development of the theory of plasma physics and its applications in controlled thermonuclear research. He worked in the areas of magnetic fusion, magnetohydrodynamics, the calculation of transport coefficients, heating, instabilities, diffusion, relativistic kinetic theory, counterstreaming plasmas, resonances, toroidal systems and guiding center plasmas in two dimensions. He was also interested in other fields: terrestrial magnetism, planetary dynamics, antimatter, space science, and oceanography. He combined many of these areas in research projects on tethers.

Thompson extended his commitment to teaching beyond his physics laboratories and classrooms. He gave talks and lectures to a range of audiences, participated in interdisciplinary seminars for undergraduates and wrote review articles for his colleagues in other areas of physics.

William B. Thompson died in 1995.

From the guide to the William Thompson Papers, 1963 - 1995, (Mandeville Special Collections Library)