for theoretical nuclear physics, in which among others John Bell worked. Here he made two pioneering contributions to nuclear physics. One was to show how to handle short-range forces in a three-body problem. The other was a powerful approximation to nuclear forces, later widely used as the ‘Skyrme model’. In 1962 he proposed a mathematical treatment of fundamental particles, in which particles such as neutrons and protons, that obey the Pauli exclusion principle, appear as manifestations of fields such as that of mesons. These entities would later in 1982 became known as Skyrmions. For this work Skyrme was awarded the Hughes medal of the Royal Society in 1985 but never received the full accolade of a fellowship there. In 1958/59 he had travelled with his wife as tourists in a one-year overland circumnavigation of the globe by car and land rover. They fell in love with the lush tropical gardens of Malaysia and decided to settle there. In 1962 they left Harwell and Skyrme took up a post in the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. He found this involved heavy lecturing commitments and was less than stimulating to his research work and by 1964 had returned to Britain to a post as professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Birmingham where he remained for the rest of his career. His hobbies were home electronics, he built his own television receiver and Hi-Fi in the 1950s, and gardening where he and Dorothy made an early attempt at self sufficiency. Skyrme died on 25 June 1987 in Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham, of an embolism after a routine operation. References 1922 births 1987 deaths British physicists Particle physicists Manhattan Project people Nuclear physicists