[sdpd] Lachlan M. D. Cranswick

[Armel Le Bail <armel.le_bail...@univ-lemans.fr>]

Dear SDPD Mailing List Subscribers,

It is already one month now that Lachlan Cranswick has been listed as 
a missing person by the police of Deep River, Ontario, Canada, and we 
have, unfortunately, to consider the possibility that he may never 
come back. As a friend of us, we have to tell you two or three things 
about him, since he was one of the creators and maintainers of this 
SDPD mailing list, among so many other activities.

Lachlan M.D. Cranswick was astonishingly hyperactive in the fields of 
the methods and computer programs for crystallography, both powder 
and single crystal, organizing all kinds of events such as satellite 
workshops during international congresses and independent events; 
round robins about the Rietveld method, SDPD, search-match; Internet 
stuff like Newsgroups (sci.techniques.xtallography), mailing lists 
(Rietveld, SDPD); editor of many IUCr Newsletters (Crystallography 
Computing, Powder diffraction and Teaching Commissions); etc. The 
CCP14 (from 1998 to 2003) - http://www.ccp14.ac.uk/ - gave him an 
opportunity to extend his activities of cataloguing the most 
efficient computer programs. He was not himself a developer but was 
constantly arguing with them in order to obtain algorithm 
improvements, texts to publish in newsletters explaining more about 
their software, etc. Thousands of his emails are out there that 
concern these topics.

He was concerned about the difficulties to do science in developing 
countries and distributed his NEXUS CD Rom where Internet access was 
not possible or difficult (Cuba, etc). That regularly updated CD 
contains a huge list of open software and documentation about 
crystallography, and more. He was also interested in so many things 
that it is difficult to summarize: philosophy, history, literature, 
poetry, etc. Flavors of his life from Australia to Canada passing by 
the United Kingdom are still available at his personal homepage in 
Melbourne: http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/, a mixture of humorous and 
serious things. Moreover, quality of life was important to him: he 
preferred finally Chalk River in a wonderful nature, Canada to 
another job opportunity at Berkeley. He was involved in many social 
and sporting activities: he was the vice-president of the Deep River 
Curling and Squash Club, an avid dinghy sailor on the Ottawa River in 
the summer, and enjoyed walking and cross-country skiing in the winter.

Two citations from him reveal his professional concerns. The first 
citation is from a paper about the future of crystallography: 
"Research institutes and departments that are not willing to reinvest 
in expert staff, as well as invest in the time and effort it takes to 
develop scientific leadership in supporting fields such as 
crystallography, may suffer a precipitous decline in their abilities 
to perform leading-edge research." (Z. Kristallogr. 217, 2002, 
293-4). The second citation is from an Acta Crystallographica paper 
(A64, 2008, 65-87): "Unless a sufficient body of people continues to 
dismantle and re-build programs, the knowledge encoded in the old 
programs will become as inaccessible as the knowledge of how to build 
the Great Pyramid at Giza." Lachlan co-authored or authored at least 
53 papers listed in the Web of Science, one of them entitled 
"Superconductivity in LaFe(1-x)CoxAsO" (Phys. Rev. B78, 2008, 104505) 
appears to be destined to attract a large number of citations 
(already 60 by 2009). He had written chapters in the most recent 
books about powder diffraction. His career was just beginning, he was 
aged only 41.

Lachlan has worked for the NRC's Canadian Neutron Beam Centre for 
seven years. "His collaborators from universities across Canada 
praise his effectiveness in supporting their research," said Daniel 
Banks, a spokesman for the centre. "He was a driving force in 
developing our scientific tools to the leading edge." Indeed, he was 
a driving force not only for the NRC but for the world!

Those of us who know him well miss him as a good friend. But the 
entire community of crystallographers will also miss him 
professionally, probably finding much less information on the Web 
about the tools they may use in order to solve their problems. 
Forgive us the joke, but we prefer to believe that he was captured by 
aliens wanting to improve the level of crystallography on their 
planet, rather than to imagine something worse.

Armel Le Bail and Ian Swainson

PS - A picture of Lachlan at the top of the Eiffel Tower in 1998.
http://www.cristal.org/Lachlan/Lachlan-1998-1.jpg
Last information about his disappearance :
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Scientist+disappearance+baffles+investigators/2520106/story.html



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