The MGMS is saddened to hear of the death of Prof. Robert (Bob) Langridge on November 11th.
Bob, who has died at the age of 90, was a true pioneer of molecular graphics. His PhD work at the University of London was supervised by Maurice Wilkins, and included the first application of a stored program digital computer (the IBM 650) to the analysis of DNA structure. Working in Oxford, essentially as technical support for the strong group of crystallographers located there, he created some of the first images of molecular structures. He was largely responsible for developing methods to display depictions of molecules as solid surfaces rather than ball and stick representations.
Denied a full academic post in the U.K. he moved to California with a chair at the University of California, San Francisco, where he founded the Graduate Program in Bioengineering and created the UCSF Computer Graphics Laboratory.
Bob will be much missed.
(Thanks to Prof. Graham Richards)
