Henry Crozier Keating Plummer (1875-1946),British astronomer and mathematician. Plummer was born and educated in Oxford. He taught mathematics in Manchester,and then worked at the observatory in Oxford (1901-1912). From 1912 to 1921 he was Astronomer Royal for Ireland. However,in 1921,due to the political troubles in Ireland,he took up a position as professor of mathematics at Woolwich,London,where he remained until he retired in 1940. He also served as President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1939-1941). In 1911,he developed a gravitational potential function to model globular clusters,now called the Plummer potential. A crater on the Moon is named after him |