F. D. Kahn (1926–1998)

F.D. (Franz Daniel) Kahn was born to a Jewish family in Nuremberg, Germany. His parents were Gretchen (Mann) and Siegfried Kahn, a Wold War I veteran and the co-owner of Trix Ltd., a successful toy company. He also had an older sister, Charlotte. After the rise of the Nazi regime to power in 1933, the family and their business were subject to anti-Jewish laws. In 1938, the German arm of Trix Ltd was sold, and the Kahns moved to England, where the company already had a branch. Franz enrolled in St. Paul's School in London, which was evacuated to the Berkshire countryside in World War II. He won the form prize for English, a remarkable achievement for a boy who had only been speaking the language for two years at the time. In 1944, he won an scholarship to Oxford University (Queen's College) and graduated with First Class Honours in mathematics in 1947. He stayed on at Queen's to work on research for his doctoral degree advised by Sydney Chapman and Harry Hemley Plaskett. Kahn moved to Balliol College in 1948 when he became a Skynner senior student. He was awarded a D.Phil. from Oxford in 1950 with the thesis, "Some problems concerning the luminosity and other properties of the upper atmosphere." In 1949, Kahn was appointed an assistant lecturer in mathematics at the University of Manchester. There he met his future wife, mathematics teacher Carla Vivienne Copeland. They married in 1951 and had four children. Kahn joined the Department of Astronomy the year after it was established in 1952, working with Bernard Lovell and Zdenek Kopal. He spent the academic year 1953-1954 in Leiden, the Netherlands, a leading institution in astronomy. While there, he wrote the paper, "The acceleration of interstellar clouds" (1954) which became a classic of contemporary astrophysics. In 1958, he won a prestigious prize from the German Society of Scientists and Physicians for the best essay on star formation. He rose through the ranks at the University of Manchester to become Professor of Astronomy in 1966. He became Head of the Department in 1981 following Prof. Kopal's retirement. In 1993, Prof. Kahn was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He served on the council of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1967-1970 and was an editor of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1993 to 1998. He was president of the Commission on Interstellar Matter set up by the International Astronomical Union in 1970-1973. He published Quasars: Their Importance in Astronomy and Physics with H.P. Palmer in 1968. The International Astronomical Union named the asteroid Kahnia for him.