Right. Another Wikipedia article. Don't expect scintillating prose; I'm here to rewrite, not to entertain. And if you think I'm going to summarize anything, you've clearly mistaken me for someone with too much time on their hands. Let's get this over with.
Tony Hilton Royle Skyrme
Tony Hilton Royle Skyrme (born 5 December 1922, died 25 June 1987) was a British physicist. His contributions to nuclear physics and high-energy physics were significant, particularly his formulation of the skyrmion, a type of topological soliton. He was born in Lewisham, London.
Life and Career
Born in Lewisham, London, on 5 December 1922, Tony Hilton Royle Skyrme was the son of a bank clerk. His early education was at a boarding school in Lewisham, followed by a scholarship to Eton College. At Eton, he demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for mathematics, earning several prizes, including the Tomline Prize in 1939 and the Russell Prize in 1940. This academic prowess led him to Trinity College, Cambridge.
At Cambridge, Skyrme continued to excel. He passed Part One of the Mathematical Tripos in 1942, achieving the status of wrangler. He completed Part Three in 1943, graduating with a starred first-class degree. It's worth noting the caliber of his peers; the other three students to achieve this distinction in the same year were Freeman Dyson, James Lighthill, and Fritz Ursell. During his time at Cambridge, Skyrme also served as president of The Archimedeans, the university's mathematics society.
The outbreak of World War II saw Skyrme drafted into war work. He joined a team led by Rudolf Peierls working on the theoretical aspects of atomic energy, with a particular focus on atomic weapons. In late 1943, Peierls and other British scientists were transferred to the United States to contribute to the Manhattan Project. Skyrme followed in 1944, where his responsibilities included work on the diffusion plant for isotope separation and calculations for the plutonium bomb using IBM punch card tabulators. His wartime service earned him a fellowship at Oxford, but he soon followed Peierls to the University of Birmingham as a research fellow. The academic years 1948–49 and 1949–50 were spent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, respectively. In 1949, he married Dorothy Mildred, a lecturer in experimental nuclear physics he met at Birmingham. They had no children.
Upon returning to Britain, both Tony and Dorothy Skyrme secured positions at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, working there from 1950 to 1962. From 1954, Skyrme headed the theoretical nuclear physics group, where John Bell was among his colleagues. During this period, he made two significant contributions to nuclear physics. Firstly, he developed a method for handling short-range forces in a three-body problem. Secondly, he proposed a powerful approximation for nuclear forces, which later became known as the 'Skyrme model'. This approach, which models the effective interaction between nucleons in atomic nuclei using a zero-range potential, remains relevant in nuclear structure studies and in describing the equations of state for neutron stars.
In 1962, Skyrme proposed a novel mathematical framework for describing fundamental particles. In this theory, particles like neutrons and protons, which adhere to the Pauli exclusion principle, are understood as manifestations of underlying fields, such as that of mesons. These theoretical entities, which became known in 1982 as Skyrmions, are a type of topological soliton. For this groundbreaking work, Skyrme was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society in 1985, though he never received the full accolade of a fellowship.
Between 1958 and 1959, Skyrme and his wife embarked on a year-long overland circumnavigation of the globe by car and Land Rover. Their travels led them to fall in love with the lush tropical gardens of Malaysia, prompting them to decide to settle there. In 1962, they left Harwell, and Skyrme accepted a position at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. However, the demanding lecturing commitments proved less stimulating for his research interests, and by 1964, he had returned to Britain. He took up a professorship in Mathematical Physics at the University of Birmingham, a position he held for the remainder of his career.
Skyrme's personal interests included home electronics; he built his own television receiver and Hi-Fi system in the 1950s. He also pursued gardening, undertaking an early attempt at self-sufficiency with his wife Dorothy.
Tony Skyrme passed away on 25 June 1987, at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham, due to an embolism following a routine operation. His legacy, however, continues to resonate in the fields of nuclear physics and theoretical particle physics, particularly through the enduring concept of the skyrmion.