Peter John Wyllie

Peter John Wyllie is a British petrologist born February 8, 1930, in London, England, who was professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology from 1983 to 1999. His research addressed experimental petrology of magmas and volatiles and the relationship between magmatism and plate tectonics, he authored the influential textbooks The Dynamic Earth in 1971 and The Way the Earth Works in 1976, and he contributed earth sciences coverage to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He received the Polar Medal in 1954, was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1981, received the Wollaston Medal in 1982, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1984, received the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2001, and served as president of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics from 1995 to 1999.