It is indeed sad news, I was fortunate enough to meet him here in WA
(western Australia) a few years back, and was enthralled by his
enthusiasm and eagerness to keep learning,
May he rest in peace and my sincere condolences to his family.
Kind regards,
Karsten Winter
----- Original Message -----
From: "Reese Bill L"
To:"rietveld_l@ill.fr"
Cc:
Sent:Tue, 19 Jul 2016 09:38:56 -0500
Subject:RE: The passing of Hugo Rietveld
Very sad to hear this news. Dr. Rietveld changed the course of my
career. I regret not getting the chance to meet him.
WILLIAM L. (BILL) REESE
X-RAY DIFFRACTION LABORATORY
_Rietveld Analysis_
_Mineral Quantification_
_Clay Mineralogy_
(832)624-9030
Lab Building
LB 3B 320
22777 Springwoods Village PKWY
Spring, TX 77389
bill.l.re...@exxonmobil.com
FROM: rietveld_l-requ...@ill.fr [mailto:rietveld_l-requ...@ill.fr] ON
BEHALF OF Alan Hewat
SENT: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 7:58 AM
TO: rietveld_l@ill.fr
SUBJECT: The passing of Hugo Rietveld
THE PASSING OF HUGO RIETVELD, ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF RIETVELD
REFINEMENT AND THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF POWDER DIFFRACTION
It is our sad duty to report the death of Hugo Rietveld at the age of
84 after a short illness. He leaves behind his wife, a son and two
daughters to whom we extend our heartfelt sympathy on behalf of the
more than one thousand members of the Rietveld Mailing List.
Hugo was born on the 7 March 1932 in The Hague and migrated to
Western Australia with his family, where in 1957 he enrolled at the
University of WA at the same time as Brian O’Connor and Syd Hall.
He obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Ted Maslen who had
studied under Dorothy Hodgkin at Oxford. Hugo pioneered single crystal
neutron diffraction at Lucas Heights Sydney with Terry Sabine, and
their first paper was published in Nature in 1961.
Clews C J B, Maslen E N, Rietveld H M and Sabine T M (1961) Nature
192 154 [1]
“X-Ray and Neutron Diffraction Examination of p-Diphenylbenzene"
Hugo's experience with manual data collection and refinement
convinced him of the need to computerise such tasks, and at Lucas
Heights and the UWA he programmed two of the first IBM-1620
mainframes [2] in Fortran-II. After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1964 with
Dorothy Hodgkin as external examiner, (she had received the Nobel
Prize for her work on penicillin and vitamin B12), he joined the
neutron diffraction group of the Reactor Centrum Nederland in Petten
and his interest turned to powder diffraction because large single
crystals were not available for the inorganic materials of interest.
The young group at Petten including Bert Loopstra, Bob van
Laar and Hugo Rietveld first addressed the problem of overlapping
powder reflections by using a relatively long neutron wavelength
(2.6 Å) with a pyrolytic graphite filter. This spread out the long
d-spacing peaks, allowing more of them to be resolved, and is still a
good solution for the magnetic structures in which they were
interested. However, for structure refinement many peaks were still
unresolved, and the shorter d-spacings needed for high atomic
resolution could not even be seen.
In a 1966 paper, Hugo already used intensities from overlapping Bragg
peaks. Along with others with the same problem, he then tried to fit
multiple peaks to overlapping regions, but with limited success. As
well, a neutron powder pattern took a whole week to collect, and the
local Electrologica-X1 computer [3] was less powerful than the
IBM-1620 - and programmed in Algol. It was there and then that the
brilliantly simple but profound idea arose of refining the crystal
structure together with the parameters describing the peak positions
and profiles all together, as published in the famous 1969 paper.
Rietveld H M (1969) Journal of Applied Crystallography 22 65-71 [4]
“A profile refinement method for nuclear and magnetic structures”
Hugo distributed his Algol refinement program [5] widely, but very
few papers were initially published using the method. Discouraged by
the limited funding available for neutron diffraction, he successfully
applied to become head of the library department at Petten.
One of us (AH), who had also completed his Ph.D. at Lucas Heights in
1970 and who had moved to Harwell, encountered the same problems with
neutron diffraction for structural transitions. On the advice of
George Bacon, AH visited Hugo in 1971 and brought back Hugo's new
Fortran-II version of the profile refinement program. A Harwell
version [6], modified to model the anisotropic vibrations preceding
structural transitions, was very successful, both at Harwell and with
Brian Fender's students at Oxford, in particular Tony Cheetham and Bob
von Dreele.
In 1973, when the UK joined the EEC and AH moved to ILL in Grenoble,
another Oxford student (WIFD) performed his first neutron powder
experiments on AH's new D1A high resolution diffractometer, where a
powder pattern took only one day to collect, and later only one hour.
Again this work was very successful, and the number of papers using
what Terry Sabine, in 1978, christened the "Rietveld Method" exploded,
supported by new computer programs including those of the early
Oxford-Grenoble champions Bob von Dreele and Juan Rodriguez-Carvajal.
Yet it was not until 1977 that R.A. Young and colleagues applied the
method to X-ray powder diffraction, leading to further rapid growth in
the number of publications. Thousands of X-ray publications using
Rietveld Refinement are now published every year.
Perhaps the greatest acknowledgement of Hugo’s work was his receipt
of the 1995 Aminoff Prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences, Two of us (AH and WIFD), along with Juan Rodriguez-Carvajal
and Ivar Olovsson, were there to witness Hugo, accompanied by his wife
and children, receive his accolade from the King of Sweden with
typical modesty, delight and genuine astonishment at the pervasive
influence of his Method across the sciences around the world. And
beyond the world - in December 2012 he was thrilled to receive an
e-mail from David Blake of the CheMin team of the Mars Science
Laboratory rover, Curiosity, who wrote saying that _he did not think
they could have convinced NASA to send an X-ray powder diffractometer
to Mars without the Rietveld Method_.
After almost 50 years, the Rietveld Method has returned to its
origins in the Netherlands, with the third of us (LvE) completing a
fast new high resolution neutron powder diffractometer (PEARL) on the
Delft reactor. Hugo Rietveld lived to see that, and last year was the
guest of honour at the opening of this new diffractometer. He, who had
been honoured throughout the world for his achievement, was honoured
in his own country by a new generation working with neutron powder
diffraction and Rietveld Refinement.
Having achieved all of that, and with a loving family and friends, he
will surely rest in peace.
Alan Hewat (AH), Bill David (WIFD) and Lambert van Eijck (LvE) July
2017
______________________________________________
DR ALAN HEWAT, NEUTRONOPTICS, GRENOBLE, FRANCE
+33.476.98.41.68
http://www.NeutronOptics.com/hewat [8]
______________________________________________
Links:
------
[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v192/n4798/abs/192154a0.html
[2]
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP1620.html
[3] https://ub.fnwi.uva.nl/computermuseum/X1.php
[4] http://scripts.iucr.org/cgi-bin/paper?a07067
[5]
http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/46/087/46087996.pdf
[6]
http://hewat.net/science/papers/1973_The_Rietveld_Program_for_the_Profile_Refinement_of_%20Neutron_Diffraction_Powder_Patterns_AERE_R7350-von_Dreele_annotations.pdf
[7] mailto:alan.he...@neutronoptics.com
[8] http://www.NeutronOptics.com/hewat
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