Sir William Lawrence Bragg

Sir William Lawrence Bragg 1890-1971, English physicist, b. Adelaide, Australia, educated in Australia and at Trinity College, Cambridge; son of W. H. Bragg. He was professor of physics at Victoria Univ., Manchester, from 1919 to 1937. From 1938 to 1953 he was professor of experimental physics at Cambridge and director of the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1954 he was made head of the Royal Institution. He shared with his father the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics for their studies, with the X-ray spectrometer, of X-ray spectra, X-ray diffraction, and of crystal structure. In 1941 he was knighted. Among his works are The Structure of Silicates (1930, 2d enl. ed. 1932) and Atomic Structure of Minerals (1937). With his father he wrote X Rays and Crystal Structure (1915, 5th ed. 1925).

Bragg, Sir (William) Lawrence (1890–1971) English physicist, b. Australia. He was director (1938–53) of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. With his father, Sir William Henry Bragg (1862–1942), he determined the mathematics involved in X-ray diffraction, showed how to compute X-ray wavelengths and studied crystal structure by X-ray diffraction. For these advances, they were jointly awarded the 1915 Nobel Prize in physics.