William Penney, Baron Penney

William Penney, Baron Penney, was a British mathematician and nuclear physicist who led the United Kingdom's development of its first atomic bomb. Born in Gibraltar in 1909, he won the Governor's Prize for Mathematics at the University of London, took a doctorate at Cambridge in 1935 on the application of quantum mechanics to the physics of crystals, and was Reader in Mathematics at Imperial College London from 1936 to 1945. In 1944 and 1945 he worked at Los Alamos on the blast effects of the atomic bomb, including the height at which it should be detonated. He then directed atomic weapons research at Aldermaston through the first British test in 1952, served on the Atomic Energy Authority from 1954, chairing it from 1964, and became Rector of Imperial College in 1967. He was made a peer in 1967, received the Order of Merit in 1969, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society from 1946.