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.
Hugo Rietveld (1932-2016)
![[Hugo Rietveld]](https://www.iucr.org/__data/assets/image/0003/124815/Hugo_Rietveld_Barrett_Award.jpg)
It is with great sadness that we report the death of Hugo Rietveld at the age of 84 after a short illness.
Hugo M. Rietveld was born in The Hague, The Netherlands, on 7 March 1932. After completing Grammar School he went to Australia and studied physics at the University of Western Australia in Perth.
In 1964 he obtained his PhD degree in Physics with a thesis entitled 'The Structure of p-Diphenylbenzene and Other Compounds', a single-crystal neutron and X-ray diffraction study. This investigation was the first single-crystal neutron diffraction study in Australia and was conducted at the nuclear reactor, HIFAR, in Sydney.
In 1964 he became a research officer at the Netherlands Energy Research Foundation ECN at Petten, The Netherlands, and was mainly involved in neutron powder diffraction studies of uranates and other ceramic compounds. After a scientific and managerial career with ECN he retired in 1992, but continued to garner a multitude of awards over the following two decades. These included the Gregori Aminoff Prize in 1995, the Barrett Award in 2003 (pictured), the Order of Oranje-Nassau in 2004, and the EPDIC Award for Distinguished Powder Diffractionists and the Hans Kühl Medal, both in 2010.
The work for which he is best known is the Rietveld Refinement Method, first published in J. Appl. Cryst. (1969), 2, 65-71.
Commemorative meeting
The work of Peter Debye 100 years ago and of Hugo Rietveld 50 years later will be celebrated in a meeting organised by the Dutch Crystallography Society NVK in Amsterdam on 22 September 2016.
