Andrew Richard Lang FRS CBE (9 September 1924 – 30 June 2008) was a British scientist and crystallographer.
In February 1945 he started his war-time ‘essential work’ at Unilever Research Laboratories in Cheshire, where he carried out X-ray crystallography on crystals of pure soaps.
Later that year he took a one-year position at the Cavendish Laboratory and in 1948 started on a PhD under W H Taylor,[4] working on developing new and improved techniques for X-ray powder diffractometry.
He finished writing his PhD thesis in 1952, and immediately sailed on the Caronia in April, bound for the Philips Laboratories at Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, where he continued the study of diffraction techniques.
While at Harvard, Lang developed a technique for observing images of defects in nearly perfect crystals, known as X-ray topography, regarded by many as his most important achievement.