Douglas Hartree

Douglas Rayner Hartree was an English mathematician and physicist who developed numerical methods for the equations of atomic physics and built a differential analyser from Meccano. Born in Cambridge in 1897, he studied at St John's College, Cambridge, after wartime work on anti-aircraft ballistics, and took his doctorate in 1926 under Ernest Rutherford. His self-consistent field method gave the Hartree equations for the distribution of electrons in an atom, which developed into the Hartree-Fock equations now central to computational chemistry. In 1929 he took the Beyer Chair of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester, where after visiting Vannevar Bush at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1933 he built a Meccano differential analyser and then a sturdier machine with Metropolitan-Vickers. He later advised the US military on the use of ENIAC for ballistics tables, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1932 and died in 1958.