| Ubi materia, ibi geometria. | Lle mae 'na fater, mae 'na geometreg. |
| Wo Materie ist, dort ist Geometrie. | Where there is matter, there is geometry. |
Award of a Civil List Pension to Myron Wyn EvansIn March of 2005, on the advice of the Prime Minister, Queen Elizabeth II awarded a Civil List Pension to Prof. Myron W. Evans, Director of the Alpha Foundation for Advanced Study (AIAS), in recognition of his contributions to science.
The Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Society kindly encouraged the appointment, and the two Chief Executives communicated during the process. Dr. Myron Evans is the only "pure chemist" ever to have been appointed to the British Civil List. (In today's terms, Michael Faraday was a physicist rather than a chemist, although the Faraday Society was later dedicated to physical chemistry and chemical physics.)
This is a high honour and only a few other leading British scientists have been awarded a Civil List Pension. These leading scientists include: the physicist and mathematician, and culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727), who was awarded a Civil List Pension in 1699; the father of classical electrodynamics, Michael Faraday (1797 - 1867), who was awarded a Civil List Pension in 1836; the father of thermodynamics, James Prescott Joule (1818 - 1889), who was awarded a Civil List Pension in 1878; the father of modern atomic theory, John Dalton (1766-1844), who was awarded a Civil List Pension in 1833; the botanist who developed knowledge of plant morphology, embryology, and biogeography, and who discovered the continuous motion of minute particles in solution (Brownian motion), Robert Brown (1773-1858), who was awarded a Civil List Pension circa 1858; and physicist George Airy (1801-1892), the Astronomer Royal, who was awarded a Civil List Pension in 1835. In the arts, notable recipients of a Civil List pension include Lord Byron, Lord Tennyson and William Wordsworth.
Prof. Evans was born in 1950, and was educated at Pontardawe Grammar School and the University of Wales Aberystwyth. He is the author [as of 2005] of some seven hundred papers and monographs in chemistry and physics. He is a Harrison Memorial Prize winner, and Meldola Medalist of the Royal Society of Chemistry, sometime Junior Research Fellow of Wolfson College Oxford, University of Wales Fellow and SERC Advanced Fellow, formerly an IBM Research Professor at IBM Kingston New York and a visiting scientist at Cornell Theory Center.
He has made many contributions to both chemistry and physics, and has recently completed Einstein's work of 1925 to 1955 in the development of a unified field theory sought after by physicists for four hundred years. This achievement has been recognised at the highest levels in the past two years. He becomes the only British scientist currently on the Civil List.
"I am most grateful to everyone who supported my appointment, and I regard the honour as one for the AIAS group as a whole, and for all my former students and colleagues".
~ Dr. Myron Evans