Clive W Kilmister

Clive W. Kilmister
Clive W. Kilmister
Born	January 3, 1924
Died	May 2, 2010 (aged 86)
Residence	United Kingdom
Nationality	British
	Scientific career
Fields	Professor of Mathematics

Clive William Kilmister (3 January 1924 – 2 May 2010) was a British mathematician who specialised in the mathematical foundations of physics, especially quantum mechanics and relativity. He spent his entire academic career at King's College London, where he became Professor of Mathematics and head of the mathematics department. He was strongly influenced by the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington and is well known for his work elaborating and elucidating Eddington's fundamental theory.

Biography

Kilmister was born on 3 January 1924. He studied mathematics at Queen Mary College, London, and remained there for his postgraduate work, completing a PhD in 1950 with a thesis titled The Use of Quaternions in Wave-Tensor Calculus. His research was supervised by the cosmologist George C. McVittie, himself a former student of Eddington, and the subject reflected Eddington's influence on the young Kilmister.

Also in 1950, Kilmister was appointed an assistant lecturer in the mathematics department at King's College London. He spent his whole professional life at King's, rising to become Professor of Mathematics and head of the department. In 1954 he helped found the King's College Gravitational Theory Group together with Hermann Bondi and Felix Pirani. Over his career he supervised a number of doctoral students, including Brian Tupper, Samuel Edgar and Tony Crilly.

Kilmister died on 2 May 2010.

Work

Kilmister's research centred on the mathematical foundations of physics, with particular attention to general relativity and quantum mechanics. He devoted much study to the work of Arthur Eddington, and became one of the principal expositors of Eddington's late "fundamental theory", which sought to derive the constants of nature from first principles. His books Eddington's Statistical Theory (1962) and Eddington's Search for a Fundamental Theory (1995) examine and reconstruct this programme.

In collaboration with Ted Bastin, A. F. Parker-Rhodes and others, Kilmister was one of the discoverers of the combinatorial hierarchy, an attempt to derive certain dimensionless physical constants from a discrete, combinatorial structure. This line of inquiry led to sustained work in combinatorial physics, set out in the books Combinatorial Physics (1995) and The Origin of Discrete Particles (2009), both written with Bastin. Kilmister was a founding member of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association, which grew out of this circle of researchers.

Alongside his foundational studies, Kilmister wrote widely used texts on classical and relativistic mechanics, special and general relativity, and the philosophy and history of mathematics.

Honors

Member of the London Mathematical Society (1949–2010)
President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics (1974–1976)
President of the Mathematical Association (1979–1980)
President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science (1981–1982)
Gresham Professor of Geometry (1972–1988)
Committee member of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation (1971–1974)
Founding member of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association

Books

Special Relativity for Physicists (1958)
Eddington's Statistical Theory (1962)
Hamiltonian Dynamics (1964)
The Environment in Modern Physics (1965)
Men of Physics: Sir Arthur Eddington (1966)
Rational Mechanics (1966)
Language, Logic and Mathematics (1967)
Lagrangian Dynamics (1967)
The Nature of the Universe (1971)
General Theory of Relativity (1973)
Russell (1984)
Schrödinger: Centenary Celebration of a Polymath (1989)
Eddington's Search for a Fundamental Theory (1995)
Combinatorial Physics (1995, with Ted Bastin)
Special Theory of Relativity (2000)
The Origin of Discrete Particles (2009, with Ted Bastin)

External links

Clive W. Kilmister on Wikipedia
Clive William Kilmister at MacTutor History of Mathematics