Dr David Keith Chalmers MacDonald FRS FRSE FRSC (24 July 1920 – 28 July 1963) was a 20th-century Scottish-born metal physicist, cryogenecist and scientific author. He is considered as one of the founding fathers of modern cryogenics.

The MacDonald Memorial Lecture at the University of Manitoba is named in his honour.[1] In authorship he is known as D. K. C. MacDonald, but friends knew him as Keith MacDonald.

Life

He was born on 24 July 1920 in Glasgow the son of George MacDonald, an engineer in Halley's Industrial Motors, a company run by his father-in-law. The family moved to Edinburgh in 1933 and his secondary education was at Edinburgh Academy. He then studied physics at the University of Edinburgh and then at the University of Oxford. He continued as a Research Fellow at Oxford gaining a doctorate (PhD).

In the Second World War he served in the REME as an Instructor at the Military College of Science in Bury.

In 1950 he emigrated to Canada to work as Director of the Cryogenic Laboratory in Ottawa.

In 1954 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were John F. Allen, Edward R. Andrew, Dirk ter Haar and Max Born. In 1960 he was also made a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and in Ottawa he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.[2]

The University of Ottawa awarded him an honorary professorship shortly before he died. He died of a rare neurological ailment[1] in Ottawa on 28 July 1963.

He was of a nervous disposition and had a morbid fear of moths.[3]

Publications

  • Near Zero (1961)
  • Thermoelectricity (1962)
  • Noise and Fluctuations (1962)
  • Introductory Statistical Mechanics for Physicists (1963)
  • Faraday, Maxwell and Kelvin (1964)

Family

He married Moira Lawrie the daughter of his neighbour in Edinburgh and his teenage sweetheart.

References

  1. 1 2 "University of Manitoba - Canadian Materials Science Conference: Conference - History". umanitoba.ca. Retrieved 11 February 2018.
  2. ↑ Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783 – 2002 (PDF). The Royal Society of Edinburgh. July 2006. ISBN 0-902-198-84-X. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 20 June 2017.
  3. ↑ Mendelssohn, K. (1964). "David Keith Chalmers MacDonald. 1920-1963". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 10: 207–220. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1964.0012. JSTOR 769319.
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