William Penney, Baron Penney

William Penney, Baron Penney

William George Penney, Baron Penney, (24 June 1909 – 3 March 1991) was an English mathematician and professor of mathematical physics at the Imperial College London and later the rector of Imperial College London. He had a leading role in the development of High Explosive Research, Britain's clandestine nuclear programme that started in 1942 during the Second World War which produced the first British atomic bomb in 1952. As the head of the British delegation working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Laboratory, Penney initially carried out calculations to predict the damage effects generated by the blast wave of an atomic bomb. Upon returning home, Penney directed the British nuclear weapons directorate, codenamed Tube Alloys and directed scientific research at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment which resulted in the first detonation of a British nuclear bomb in Operation Hurricane in 1952. Read more on Wikipedia

His biography is available in different languages on Wikipedia. William Penney, Baron Penney is the 803rd most popular physicist (up from 808th in 2019), the 5th most popular biography from Gibraltar and the most popular Physicist.