Denis Lawrence Weaire 1984-2007
Denis Weaire was born in 1942. He was a student and Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge where he graduated with a BA in 1964 and a PhD in 1968. He worked in the United States at Harvard and Yale before taking up professorships in Heriot-Watt University and University College Dublin. In 1971 while at Harvard University with Michael Thorpe, they developed the Weaire-Thorpe model for computation of the electronic structure of amorphous silicon. Weaire was appointed Erasmus Smith’s professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy in October 1984, a position he held until 2007. Weaire’s research interests include computational physics, amorphous materials, electronic structure, magnetic devices, soft condensed matter, history of science and especially, properties of foams.
Weaire was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He served as president of the European Physical Society from 1997 to 1999. He was also vice-president of Academia Europaea and the Institute of Physics. In 1994 he co-founded Magnetic Solutions Ltd, a company still in operation which sells a wide range of magnetic products. In 2002 he received the Cecil Powell Memorial award from the European Physical Society. In 2005 he was awarded the Cunningham Medal from the Royal Irish Academy. He received the Hollingweck Medal from the Institute of Physics and French Physical Society in 2008. In 1984 he helped organise the first physics conference on foams.
Weaire has authored over 350 publications. This includes several books such as ‘The Physics of Foam’ with Stefan Hutzler, ‘The Pursuit of Perfect Packing’ with Tomaso Aste, and ‘George Francis Fitzgerald.’ His most notable publication comes from a 1994 paper regarding the structure of foam. The ‘Weaire -Phelan’ structure overturned conjectures on the structure of the minimal energy foam structure by Lord Kelvin a century before. The Weaire-Phelan structure has the minimal energy structure of any known foam structure of equal-sized bubbles in three dimensions. The structure was used in the building of the Beijing National Aquatic Centre built for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Weaire retired in 2007 and continues to work with the foams and complex systems group in Trinity College.
Sources
- TCD (2019), Denis Weaire, TCD, https://www.tcd.ie/research/profiles/?profile=dweaire
- TCD (2023) Foams and Complex Systems Group, TCD, https://www.tcd.ie/physics/research/groups/foams/index.html
- Research Gate (Accessed July 2023), Denis Weaire, In Research Gate,
- Eric Finch (2016), Three centuries of Physics in Trinity College Dublin, Living Edition
- Image of Denis Weaire, Downloaded from https://www.ae-info.org/ae/Member/Weaire_Denis