Alan Lindsay Mackay

Alan Lindsay Mackay ( born September 6, 1926 in Wolverhampton ) is a British physicist who deals with solid-state physics and crystallography.

Life

Alan Lindsay Mackay was the son of Robert L. Mackay, MC, MD, OBE, and Margaret Mackay Brown, nee McLellan, MB, Ch.B., OBE, was born. Mackay studied from 1944 at Trinity College, University of Cambridge predominantly physics and did his degree in 1947. He then spent two years scientists at Philips Electrical. In 1951 he received his doctorate at Birkbeck College in London with John Desmond Bernal with a thesis on X-ray structural analysis.

He remained at Birkbeck College, where he was Professor of Crystallography in 1986 ( the same year he received the D.Sc. ). He became a Fellow of Birkbeck College in 2002.

Even after his retirement in 1991 he continued to work in scientific collaborations with India, Mexico and Korea. He is a member of the Mexican and Korean Academy of Sciences.

In 1988 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2010 he received for his pioneering work on quasicrystals the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize with Dov Levine and Paul Steinhardt.

Mackay is married and has two sons and a daughter.

Work

He dealt with corrosion, crystallography, electron microscopy applications. He became known as one of the pioneers of the study of quasicrystals in the early 1980s. A first work in this direction by him appeared in 1962, in which he showed how to pack spheres in icosahedral arrangement. In 1981 he published a paper in Russian on the application of the Penrose tiling in crystallography and 1982 he headed the corresponding diffraction patterns from ..

Mackay researches on the said of him Generalized Crystallography area, which covers beyond of crystals of the mineralogy and chemistry more complex structures of materials science and biology.

He suggested novel structures for graphite materials, created from ideas to minimal surfaces with negative curvature. These generalize Buckminster fullerenes.

Writings

• A dictionary of scientific quotations, Taylor & Francis, 1991, ISBN 978-0750301060
• Eric A. Lord, S. Ranganathan New geometries for new materials, Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0521861045
• Generalized Crystallography, Comp. & Maths. with Applications, Volume 12 B, 1986, pp. 12-37
• Julyan HE Cartwright with Beyond crystals: the dialectic of materials and information, Phil Trans Roy. Soc. A, Volume 370, 2012, pp. 2807-2822, Arxiv