Dr. J. D. Cockcroft, F.R.S

Abstract

DR. J. D. COCKCROFT, whose election to the Jacksonian professorship of natural philosophy, in the University of Cambridge, has just been announced, is, like his predecessor, the present secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, both a member of St. John's College and a northerner. Having gained valuable experience in heavy electrical industry at an early stage in his career, Dr. Cockcroft entered St. John's College from the University of Manchester as Dowman Sizar and Hoare Exhibitioner in mathematics in October 1922. In 1924, he obtained the highest possible honours in Part II of the Mathematical Tripos and was elected scholar of his college. Thereafter he was engaged in research in Cambridge, first of a mathematical nature, concerning the heating of transformer coils (1925) and later, at the Cavendish Laboratory, of an experimental character regarding the deposition of surface films by atomic beams (1928). He took his Ph.D. and was elected fellow of St. John's College in 1928. Although his publications have not been numerous since that date, during the last ten years he has contributed in a remarkable degree to the prosecution of physical research in Cambridge. He was largely responsible, with Kapitza, for the design of much of the equipment used in the production of intense magnetic fields in the early years of this period (and latterly the direction of the Royal Society Mond Laboratory has devolved almost entirely upon his shoulders)—and, with Walton, of the arrangement by which nuclear disintegration was first effected by artificially accelerated particles (1932). More recently, he has been the moving spirit in the construction and development of the Cambridge cyclotron, and he has taken over the major work of supervision of the building operations made possible by Lord Austin's bequest. Then, in college, he has filled the office of junior bursar for the last six years, and in the University has been indispensable on numerous executive bodies. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1936 and this year was the recipient with Walton of the Hughes Medal of the Society. His many friends will wish him well in his new office, and some measure of relief from his numerous extraneous duties.