Alister McLellan

Alister George McLellan (4 June 1919 – 1 July 2012) was a New Zealand mathematician and physicist.

Alister McLellan
Born	Alister George McLellan (1919-06-04)4 June 1919 Christchurch, New Zealand
Died	1 July 2012(2012-07-01) (aged 93)
Alma mater	University of Edinburgh
Scientific career
Thesis	The radial distribution function and its application to the properties of fluids (1948)
Doctoral advisor	Max Born
Doctoral students	David J. Lockwood

Academic career

Born in Christchurch and brought up in Westport, McLellan attended Nelson College and then the University of Otago, from where he graduated with a BSc and an MSc in mathematics and science. He joined the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research doing war work and after the war went to Edinburgh to do a PhD under Max Born. His thesis was entitled The radial distribution function and its application to the properties of fluids.

McLellan returned to the University of Otago and the University of Canterbury where he rose in the ranks of university administration in parallel with his research, becoming head of department in 1955, foundation chair of the new University Grants Committee. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1961 and Nuffield Foundation Commonwealth Bursary. He served as president of the Canterbury Branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He retired in 1985.

Selected works

• The Classical Thermodynamics of Deformable Materials Cambridge University Press 1980, reissued 2011. ISBN 0521180120

External links

• institutional homepage Archived 6 October 2014 at the Wayback Machine