David Maurice Brink was one of the founders of Theoretical Nuclear Physics, as it was known in the second half of the 20th century. He wrote seminal papers on several subjects in nuclear structure and reactions, such as Hartree-Fock calculations and effective interactions, angular distributions of gamma-rays, the Generator Coordinate Method and applications to clustering phenomena, energy-fluctuations in nuclear cross sections, selection rules and semi-classical approximations in heavy-ion scattering, interacting boson model and many others.
He was born in Tasmania, Australia, in 1930. He got a Bachelor of Science degree of the University of Tasmania (1951) and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in the University of Oxford (1955). From 1958, he was a Lecturer and fellow at Baliol College, Oxford. He became a Reader in 1988 and retired in 1993. From 1993 to 1998, he was the vice director of the European Center for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics and Related Areas (INCT*) and Professor of the History of Physics in the University of Trento.
Since 1981 he has been a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1982 he received the Rutherford Medal from the Institute of Physics. He has been an external member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala since 1992. In 2006 he received the Lise Meitner Prize for his contributions to the theory of nuclear structure and nuclear reactions over several decades, including fundamental work on the theory of nuclear masses using effective interactions of the Skyrme type, nuclear-giant resonances, clustering in nuclei and quantum mechanical and semiclassical theories of heavy ion scattering and heavy ion reactions .
He wrote several books, including the one on Angular Momentum, in collaboration with G.R. Satchler, which is widely used by the nuclear physics community. He played an important role in supervising and collaborating with many members of the Brazilian Physics community.
David Brink passed away in Oxford, on March 8th. This was a great loss for the Nuclear Physics community. His legacy will survive for many years.
(Text by L..F. A. Canto and D. P. Menezes)
