Abstract
THE Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society has been awarded to Prof. E. A. Milne, Rouse Ball professor of mathematics, University of Oxford, for his work on radiative equilibrium and theory of stellar atmospheres. A Jackson Gwilt (bronze) Medal has been awarded to Mr. Walter Frederick Gale, of Waverley, N.S.W., for his discoveries of comets and his work for astronomy in New South Wales. Prof. Milne has occupied his present chair since 1929, having then moved to Oxford from Manchester, where he had been professor of applied mathematics. Before going to Manchester, however, he. was university lecturer in astrophysics at Cambridge and assistant director of the Solar Physics Observatory. His contributions to mathematical physics and astrophysics are of particular value on account of the close contacts they represent between observational work and theoretical conceptions. His essay as Smith's prizeman at Cambridge in 1922 embodied a treatment of radiative equilibrium which has proved the starting point for the greater part of the more recent work on stellar atmospheres. In his Bakerian lecture of the Royal Society in 1929, on the opacity of stellar atmospheres, Prof. Milne further developed a method of determining stellar temperatures and pressures, depending largely on the study of the contours of spectrum lines, that is, on the determination of their intensities at different distances from the centre of the lines. Of a different character is the model of the universe conceived by Prof. Milne and developed in a lecture entitled “World-Gravitation by Kinematic Methods” delivered before the London Mathematical Society in May last. The striking simplicity of the method used in the construction of this statistical model, and the far-reaching character of its interpretations, open up a new vista of possibilities for cosmic research.
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Royal Astronomical Society's Medal Awards. Nature 135, 94 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135094b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135094b0