History of the IUCr

The International Union of Crystallography was formed after the ravages of the Second World War to provide a focus and direction for the international community of crystallographers. It was formally admitted to the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) on 7 April 1947. Its First General Assembly and Congress were held at Harvard University from 28 July to 3 August 1948. Here the formal inauguration of the International Union of Crystallography took place, in the presence of some 350 crystallographers from eleven nations.

A Founding Father

Paul Peter Ewald (1888–1985) is credited, as a young man, with triggering the train of thought that led Max von Laue to undertake the diffraction experiments that began the science of X-ray crystallography. Already in 1944, while war was still raging, Ewald proposed an international union for crystallography, an idea (nurtured by Lawrence Bragg in 1946) that led, with international support, to the formation of the IUCr in 1947. Ewald was dismayed by the wartime closure of the main crystallography journal, Zeitschrift für Kristallographie, and was foremost in founding a new journal run by the Union: Acta Crystallographica, which became the leading journal in the field. The premier Academic Prize in crystallography, awarded by the IUCr every three years since 1987, is named in his honour