Tony Hilton Royle Skyrme (; 5 December 1922, Lewisham – 25 June 1987) was a British physicist. He proposed modelling the effective interaction between nucleons in nuclei by a zero-range potential. This idea is still widely used today in nuclear structure, and in equations of state for neutron stars. Skyrme is perhaps best known for formulating the first topological soliton to model a particle, the skyrmion. Some of his most important work can be found in his selected papers. Skyrme was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society in 1985. Life Tony Skyrme was born in Lewisham, London, the child of a bank clerk. He attended a boarding school in Lewisham and then won a scholarship to Eton public school. He excelled at mathematics and won several prizes in the subject at the school, including the Tomline Prize in 1939 and the Russell Prize in 1940. He went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he again excelled, he passed part one of the mathematical tripos as a wrangler in 1942, and part three in 1943 with a first class degree. While there he was president of The Archimedeans mathematics society. With World War Two at its height after graduation he was drafted into war work as a mathematician under Rudolf Peierls who was leading a team working on the theoretical aspects of atomic energy, particularly as applied to atomic weapons. At the end of 1943 Peierls and several other of the British scientists working on the atom, were transferred to the United States to assist in the Manhattan project to build a nuclear weapon. Skyrme followed later in 1944, and worked on problems concerning the diffusion plant for isotope separation. He also used IBM punch card tabulators to calculate the implosions needed to detonate a plutonium bomb. His war time work earned him a fellowship at Oxford. But he followed Peierls to the University of Birmingham where he became a research fellow. The academic years 1948–9 and 1949–50 were spent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, respectively. In 1949 he married Dorothy Mildred a lecturer in experimental nuclear physics who he met at Birmingham University. Their marriage had no children. Returning to Britain both he and Dorothy gained posts at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell from 1950 to 1962. From 1954 he was head of the group there