Peter Hirsch

Peter Hirsch was a British metallurgist who lived from 1925 to 2025, celebrated for fundamental contributions to applying transmission electron microscopy to metals and for experimentally establishing the role of dislocations in plastic flow. He studied at Cambridge and held the Isaac Wolfson Chair in Metallurgy at Oxford from 1966 to 1992, substantially developing its Department of Metallurgy into an internationally recognized center. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1963, was knighted in 1975, and was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering in 2001; he had escaped Nazi Germany as a child by Kindertransport. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1984.