Sir George Thomson was born in Cambridge on 3 May 1892. In 1924 he married Kathleen Buchanan (died 1941) and they had two sons and two daughters. Thomson and Clinton J. Davisson shared the 1937 Nobel prize for physics for showing that electrons behave as waves in spite of being particles. They had arrived at the same conclusions independently of each other. In 1930 he was made professor of physics at Imperial College, London and remained so until 1952. When the fission of uranium by neutron was discovered in 1939 Thomson realised its potential and persuaded the British Air Ministry to procure a ton of uranium oxide for experiments. This led to the formation of the MAUD committee. In 1940 Thomson was made chairman of MAUD - its duties were to supervise the investigation into the possibilities of uranium's contributing to the war effort. Thomson left for America in August 1941 because his wife had become very ill. He became British Scientific Liaison officer in Ottawa until 1942 when he returned to England as Scientific Adviser to the Air Ministry. In 1952 Thomson returned to Cambridge as master of Corpus Christi and died in Cambridge on 10 September 1975.