Old notices
These pages collect together notices posted on the IUCr web site in past years. They are retained for archival interest, but there is no guarantee (or likelihood) that many of the web links found in these notices will still be active.
X-ray exhibition opens at the University of Liverpool
An X-ray exhibition celebrating the achievements of Sir Oliver Lodge, Charles Barkla, Arnold Beevers and 
Henry Lipson was recently opened at the University of Liverpool by Vice-Chancellor Professor Janet Beer.
Liverpool University proved a fitting venue for such a celebration as Sir Oliver Lodge was appointed first Professor of Physics at the University in 1881. He served the University for 19 years and demonstrated the first use of X-rays for surgery in 1896. Charles Glover Barkla was a graduate and then a lecturer at the University. He made key contributions to the birth of X-ray physics and crystallography, for which he received the 1917 Nobel Prize in Physics. Arnold Beevers and Henry Lipson, who were also students and staff at Liverpool in the 1930s, invented the Beevers-Lipson strip which for a time became the workhorse of crystallographic calculations. The Beevers-Lipson strips (strips of paper containing the values of some trigonometric functions) were used in laboratories to speed up the calculations (by hand) of Fourier transforms. More than 300 boxes were distributed to crystallographic laboratories worldwide and remained in use until approximately 1970.
The exhibition was opened in the presence of a number of family members of Henry Lipson and coincides with the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize for Physics to Lawrence Bragg, who is regarded as the father of X-ray crystallography. A recent editorial from the editor-in-chief of IUCr journals looks at crystallography in the 21st century.
Vice Chancellor Professor Janet Beer summed up by saying "the University has some of the outstanding groups in crystallography led by Professor Matt Rosseinsky and Professor Andy Cooper in the Department Chemistry, and Max Perutz Professor Samar Hasnain and Dr Svetlana Antonyuk, Co-Directors of the Barkla X-ray Laboratory of Biophysics". She added, "We are proud of our heritage and are committed to be strong in the area of crystallography in the coming decades".
This story is reprinted from an original press release from the University of Liverpool, with editorial changes made by the IUCr.
