William Fuller Brown, Jr.

William Fuller Brown Jr. (21 September 1904 – 12 December 1983) was an American physicist and electrical engineer who developed the theory of micromagnetics, a continuum theory of ferromagnetism that has had numerous applications in physics and engineering. He published three books: Magnetostatic Principles in Ferromagnetism, Micromagnetics, and Magnetoelastic Interactions.

Biography William Fuller Brown Jr. was born in Lyon Mountain, New York on September 21, 1904 to William Fuller Brown and Mary Emily Williams, daughter of Hon. Andrew Williams. He graduated from Cornell University with a BA in English in 1925 and began teaching at Carolina Academy, a private high school in Raleigh, North Carolina. Teaching general science "restimulated" his interest in physics. He received his PhD in physics in 1937.

Development of micromagnetics At the time of Brown's graduation from Cornell, the theory for magnetic domains was not very developed. Richard Becker and Werner Döring, in their book Ferromagnetismus, emphasized internal stresses. Brown realized that the most important factor, magnetostatic forces, were "totally ignored". He was strongly influenced by the 1935 paper of Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, which developed a one-dimensional continuous model for domain wall motion. In 1938 W. C. Elmore published a paper that discussed a three-dimensional generalization of the Landau-Lifshitz theory, but did not attempt to derive the equations. Brown set out to do this.

Brown published his equations in 1940 and applied them to the approach to saturation of magnetization curves. He later said that "nobody paid any attention to them for 16 years",

Honors In 1967, Brown received an A. Cressy Morrison Award from the New York Academy of Sciences. In 1968 he was elected Fellow of the IEEE and in 1974 was made an Honorary Life Member of the IEEE Magnetics Society. He was also elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1938 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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