Bullough's father, William Bullough, was a teacher of German in
Newcastle-under-Lyme and was himself a graduate of the
Victoria University of Manchester. His mother Edith (née Norman) was also a teacher and both parents were
Quakers. Although universally known as Robin, he was actually christened Robert Keith Bullough. Both Robin and his elder brother
Donald attended
Newcastle High School (then a
direct grant grammar school). Donald went on to become a successful professor of medieval history. On leaving school at 16, Bullough obtained a scholarship to
Emmanuel College, Cambridge but had to do
National Service in the
RAF in 1948 and 1949. Three days before his
demobilisation he had an accident, putting a rawl plug into a wall, as a piece of steel from a chisel flew into his left eye. He was practically blind in that eye from then on. He obtained a BA in
Natural Sciences at Cambridge, specialising in
Theoretical Physics for
Part II. He went on to obtain a PhD in
Chemistry from the
University of Leeds in 1957. He then obtained a job as a Mathematical Physicist at the
British Rayon Research Association in Manchester between 1959 and 1960 before obtaining a post as lecturer at UMIST. Bullough travelled widely to facilitate collaboration, with regular visiting appointments and research visits to
Copenhagen,
Jyväskylä,
Los Alamos, DTH Lyngby in Denmark, and
Ben Gurion University in Israel. He was promoted to
Reader in 1967 and Professor of Mathematical Physics in 1973. He organised many conferences over his career including the first National Quantum Electronics Conferences (QEP1) in
Manchester in September 1973 and at which he made a first report of 'optical solitons', this was the first of fifteen biennial meetings. By 1973 his research group in UMIST had found solutions to the
sine-Gordon and the self-induced transparency (SIT) equations for their multi-soliton solutions and gone on to both introduce, and to solve the
initial value problem for, the system they called the ‘Reduced Maxwell-Bloch (RMB) Equations’. Bullough supervised 24 successful doctoral students and had some 33 post doctoral research associates and visiting fellows. In 1999 he gave the specially invited 'Special Foundation Lecture' at the Fourteenth UK National Quantum Electronics & Photonics Conference (QEP14) held at the University of Manchester. The lecture was entitled "The optical soliton of QE1 is the BEC of QE14: has the quantum soliton arrived?" paid tribute to his 45 years work in this area. This work in theoretical
quantum optics includes the discovery of the "optical soliton" as such around 1973. Only
Steven Chu,
Nobel Laureate 1997, was similarly honoured at this conference. Bullough died on 30 August 2008. ==Bibliography==