William Allen Miller

William Allen Miller FRS (17 December 1817 – 30 September 1870) was a British scientist.

Life

Miller was born in Ipswich, Suffolk and educated at Ackworth School and King's College London. He was related to William Allen and first cousin to the leading suffragist Anne Knight.<ref> Edward H. Milligan, ‘Knight, Anne (1786–1862)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 29 Aug 2017</ref>

On the death of John Frederic Daniell he succeeded to the Chair of Chemistry at King's. Although primarily a chemist, the scientific contributions for which Miller is mainly remembered today are in spectroscopy and astrochemistry, new fields in his time.

Miller wrote the textbook Elements of Chemistry, Theoretical and Practical, Part I Chemical Physics in 1855.<ref>W.A. Miller (1855) Elements of Chemistry, Theoretical and Practical via Internet Archive</ref> In the preface he acknowledged the assistance of Charles Tomlinson.

He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1867 jointly with William Huggins, for their spectroscopic study of the composition of stars.<ref>William Huggins & W.A. Miller (1 January 1864) On the spectra of some of the nebulae, Proceedings of the Royal Society, link from Internet Archive</ref> In 1845, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 1870 Miller had completed the manuscript for Introduction to the Study of Inorganic Chemistry when he fell ill. He passed it to Charles Tomlinson to prepare it for publication.<ref>Template:Cite book via Internet Archive</ref>

According to his obituary,<ref>Template:Cite journal </ref> Miller married Eliza Forrest of Birmingham in 1842. He died in 1870, a year after his wife, and they are both buried at West Norwood Cemetery. They were survived by a son and two daughters.

The crater Miller on the Moon is named after him.

Further reading

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