Leon Mestel
| Leon Mestel | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 5, 1927 Melbourne, Australia |
| Alma mater |
Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A.) (1948) Trinity College, Cambridge (Ph.D) (1952) |
| Thesis | Some problems of stellar structure (1952) |
| Doctoral advisor | Fred Hoyle |
| Doctoral students | Donald Lynden-Bell |
| Notable awards | Eddington Medal (1993) |
Leon Mestel (born 5 August 1927) is a British astronomer and astrophysicist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Sussex. His research interests are in the areas of star formation and structure, especially stellar magnetism and astrophysical magnetohydrodynamics. He has been awarded both the Eddington Medal (1993) and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (for Astronomy, 2002). Following his retirement, he has also written several obituaries and biographical articles on physicists and astrophysicists.
Leon Mestel was born on 5 August 1927 in Melbourne, Australia. With his family, he migrated to England at the age of three, where he lived in Forest Gate, east London. He was the son of Rabbi Solomon Mestel and Rachel, née Brodetsky, sister of Selig Brodetsky. He was educated at West Ham Secondary School, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained his BA in 1948 and his Ph.D in 1952.
He married Sylvia Louise Cole in 1951, and they have two sons and two daughters. One of his sons is Jonathan Mestel (born 1957), a mathematics professor and chess grandmaster. In 1982, as part of a memorial series of annual lectures at the University of Leeds commemorating his maternal uncle, Leon Mestel gave the 23rd Selig Brodetsky Memorial Lecture, titled Astronomy: A Mirror to Physics.
Mestel's research interests are in the area of astrophysics, including: stellar structure, stellar evolution, star formation, cosmic magnetism and pulsar electrodynamics.
...
Wikipedia