Donald Lynden-Bell (1935–2018)

Abstract

Donald Lynden-Bell was lucky in his heredity and his environment. His great-grandfather knew the famous astronomer John Herschel. His father, an army Colonel, inherited a telescope and introduced Donald to the wonders of the sky. At his school, Marlborough College, Donald was exceedingly well taught. He came up to Clare College to read mathematics. In his second year, he was supervised by the great physicist Abdus Salam, who advised him to divert for a year to study physics, which Donald did before returning to mathematics for his fourth year. He thereby had a superb launching-pad for research. Donald Lynden-Bell. Image courtesy of Amanda Smith and the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. Donald’s doctoral supervisor was Leon Mestel, a world expert on cosmic magnetism. But Donald found Leon’s problems “too intractable,” so instead he began to forge his lifetime interest in stellar dynamics: how swarms of stars configured into the distinctively shaped clusters and galaxies that populate the cosmos. At that time the British had no access to world-class optical telescopes; California was the mecca for astronomers. So after Donald got his doctorate in 1960, he spent 2 formative years in Pasadena, California, where he had the luck to “click” with Allan Sandage, the high priest of astronomy at that time. Their joint project led to Donald’s first really famous paper (1): inferring how our Milky Way galaxy formed from a primordial spinning gas cloud, and what we could learn about its history from the orbits of the … [↵][1]1Email: mjr{at}ast.cam.ac.uk. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1