William Frank Vinen (15 February 1930 – 8 June 2022) was a British physicist specialising in low temperature physics.

Career

Vinen was born on 15 February 1930, the son of Gilbert Vinen and his wife Olive Maud Vinen, née Roach. After Watford Grammar School, he attended Clare College, Cambridge, completing a doctorate (PhD) in 1956. He was a Research Fellow there from 1955 to 1958, when he became a Fellow at

Pembroke College, Cambridge Pembroke College (officially "The Master, Fellows and Scholars of the College or Hall of Valence-Mary") is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college is the third-oldest college of the university and has over 700 ...

."Vinen, William Frank, (Joe)"
''Who's Who'' (online edition, Oxford University Press, December 2017). Retrieved 4 January 2018. In 1962, he was appointed to a Chair of Physics at Birmingham University. He was appointed to the Poynting Chair in 1973. He served as Head of Department from 1973 until 1981, and retired from the University in 1997.

Awards and honours

Vinen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1973. One or more of the preceding sentences may incorporate text from the royalsociety.org website where "all text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." , "Intellectual property rights" His certificate of election reads: He was awarded the

Rumford Medal The Rumford Medal is an award bestowed by Britain's Royal Society every alternating year for "an outstandingly important recent discovery in the field of thermal or optical properties of matter made by a scientist working in Europe". First awar ...

in 1980 in "recognition of his discovery of the quantum of circulation in superfluid helium and his development of new techniques for precise measurements within liquid helium."

Personal life

In 1960, Vinen married Susan-Mary Audrey Master; they had one son, Richard, and one daughter, Katie, and lived in Birmingham."Professor Frank William Vinen FRS CPhys Hon.FInstP (1930–2022)",
'' Institute of Physics''. Retrieved 5 March 2023.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vinen, Joe 1930 births 2022 deaths 20th-century British physicists Fellows of the Royal Society Members of Academia Europaea Academics of the University of Birmingham Alumni of Clare College, Cambridge Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge