Obituary: Professor H. A. Skinner (30 January 1916–14 May 1996)
✍ Scribed by GEOFFREY PILCHER
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 384 KB
- Volume
- 28
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0021-9614
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Henry Alistair Skinner was always known to his family, his friends, his students and all his colleagues in the academic world as Hank Skinner.
Hank entered Lincoln College, Oxford in 1934, a fortunate choice as his tutor was N. V. Sidgwick who had great influence on our ideas concerning types of chemical bond and the relationships between structure, energy, and chemical behaviour. Hank was one of many of Sidgwick's students to pursue a distinguished career. Hank received his B.A. Degree with First Class Honours in 1938 and for the final undergraduate year, worked with H. W. Thompson on the infra-red spectrum of methylamine for which the B.Sc. Degree was awarded. For his D.Phil., Hank worked with L. E. Sutton, another of Sidgwick's pupils, on the determination of molecular structures by electron diffraction. The results for the chlorides and bromides of Ta, Nb, Bi, for (CH 3 ) 6 Pb 2 , (CH 3 ) 6 Al 2 , and a series of methyl-substituted tin chlorides and bromides still stand. It was during this period that Hank learned to become an extremely competent experimentalist.