Nicholas Kemmer

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Nicholas Kemmer (7 December 1911 -- 21 October 1998) was a physicist. Born in St Petersberg, his family moved to Germany in 1922, where was educated at Bismarckschule Hanover and then at the University of Göttingen, did his doctorate at the University of Zurich before moving to the Beit Fellowship at Imperial College London.

He moved to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1940 to work on Tube Alloys the wartime atomic energy project. In 1940 when Egon Bretscher and Norman Feather showed that a slow neutron reactor fuelled with uranium would in theory produce substantial amounts of plutonium-239 as a by-product, Kemmer proposed the names Neptunium for the new element 93 and Plutonium for 94 by analogy with the outer planets Neptune and Pluto beyond Uranus (uranium being element 92). The Americans Edwin M. McMillan and Philip Abelson at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory who had made the same discovery fortuitously suggested the same names.

He spent two years 1944-1946 in Canada. At the University of Edinburgh from 1953 to 1979 he was Tait Professor of Mathematical Physics, then Professor Emeritus. He was elected FRS in 1956 and won its Hughes Medal in 1966.