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Brian Wybourne
New Zealand physicist (1935–2003) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Brian Garner Wybourne (5 March 1935 – 26 November 2003) was a New Zealand theoretical physicist known for his groundbreaking work on the energy levels of rare-earth ions and applications of Lie groups to the atomic f shell and by mathematicians for his work on group representation theory.[1]
Born in Morrinsville in 1935, Wybourne attended Canterbury University College, graduating with an MSc with second-class honours in 1958 and a PhD in 1960.[2][3]
After post-doctoral research positions at Johns Hopkins University and Argonne National Laboratory in the United States, Wybourne returned to the University of Canterbury in 1966 to take up a professorship in physics, at the age of 31.[4] Notable doctoral students of Wybourne at Canterbury include Timothy Haskell.[5]
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1970,[6] and the same year he won the society's Hector Medal, the highest award in New Zealand science at that time.[7]
He served as the head of the physics department from December 1982 to November 1989.[8] In 1991 he was a visiting professor at the Nicholas Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, and decided to remain there permanently.[4]
Wybourne was appointed to a professorship in the Nicholas Copernicus University Institute of Physics in 1993. In 2003 he received an award from the Polish Minister of Education for his outstanding contribution to science. A month later he unexpectedly died of a stroke. In his 13 years in Poland Wybourne published 80 scientific papers.[9][10]
Wybourne's time in Poland was chronicled in The Polish Odyssey of Brian G. Wybourne, written by his colleague at Nicholas Copernicus University, Jacek Karwowski.
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