Monday, July 28, 2003
Gerald Hawkins passes on
Gerald Hawkins, who has died aged 75, used a computer to show that the stones and other archaeological features at Stonehenge formed a pattern of alignments with 12 major lunar and solar events, suggesting that it was used as a sort of neolithic observatory or astronomical calendar.
Gerald Stanley Hawkins was born at Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, on April 20 1928. After taking a degree in Mathematics and Physics at Nottingham University, he took a doctorate in radio-astronomy under Sir Bernard Lovell at Manchester University.
Later he gained a DSc for astronomical research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatories. He was Professor of Astronomy and chairman of the department at Boston University from 1957 to 1969, and dean of Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, from 1969 to 1971.
In the 1990s he turned his attention to the phenomenon of crop circles that had appeared in various fields in southern England. From examination of several examples, he discovered that the patterns of circles, triangles and squares embody geometric theorems that express numerical relationships conforming to "diatonic" (i.e. musical) ratios of the major scale. Whoever made the circles, he concluded, had a highly developed facility for Euclidean geometry and advanced mathematics. The intellectual profile conformed to that of a first-year mathematics undergraduate.
Hawkins died on May 26 while flying his remote controlled model aeroplanes in the fields at his farm in Rappahannock County, Massachusetts. He is survived by his second wife, Julia Dobson.
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