Douglas Hartree

Douglas Rayner Hartree was an English mathematician and physicist, born in Cambridge in 1897, most famous for the development of numerical analysis and its application to the Hartree-Fock equations of atomic physics and for building a differential analyser using Meccano. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, and during the First World War joined a group working on anti-aircraft ballistics under A. V. Hill, where he gained an abiding interest in practical calculation and numerical methods for differential equations. He devised the Hartree height-finder, which British anti-aircraft troops used extensively until better optical height-finders were introduced. After the war he returned to Cambridge and graduated in 1922.