It is with sadness that we announce the death of Professor Ian Butterworth
It is with great sadness we announce the death of Ian Butterworth, Professor Emeritus, on 29 November. He would have been 83 on 3 December.
Ian was Head of the High Energy Physics group 1971-1980, Head of the Physics Department 1980-1983, Research Director of CERN 1983-1986, Principal of Queen Mary College 1986-1991 and a Distinguished Research Fellow until his death. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1981, the American Physical Society in 1985. was awarded the CBE in 1984 and held the post of Vice-President of the Academia Europaea from 1997- 2003. Ian obtained his Ph D at Manchester in Patrick Blackett’s Cosmic Ray group before moving to Imperial College in 1958 to become the driving force behind the experimental High Energy Physics Group. He obtained international recognition for his work on the discovery and classification of mesonic and baryonic resonances, a crucial step towards the currently accepted quark model of hadronic matter. During his long and distinguished career he was both respected and genuinely liked by very many colleagues around the world.
Amongst the many tributes received were: ‘Ian was such a power for good at Imperial’, ‘He was so spirited and jolly’ ,‘Sad loss of the person who was a source of inspiration for me’, ‘Ian was a major force in physics and especially in the department!’
Our thoughts are with his daughter, Jody and her husband Nicholas.
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Reporter
Linda Jones
Department of Physics
