[1] Williams was stocky and strong, with blue eyes, brown hair and a broad grin; he was gregarious, passionate about cricket, and enjoyed practical jokes.
[1][2] At Manchester he attained a doctorate in physics in 1926 for his work with Bragg, studying X-rays in gases, then a second degree at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge under Ernest Rutherford.
[2] Early on in World War 2 Blackett asked Williams to join RAE Farnborough to apply his imaginative physical mind to the problem of the U-boat menace.
In 1941 Williams joined Blackett at the newly formed Operational Research Section at the Admiralty's Coastal Command where he worked for several more years devising more effective methods of dealing with German submarines.
[3][2] Williams was diagnosed with cancer in 1944 and, despite two operations, he was able to visit Washington in 1945 in connection with the continuing war in the Far East, and also write a scientific paper as a tribute to Niels Bohr on his sixtieth birthday.
His distinctive gift of deep physical understanding, using only relatively simple mathematics, would have been of the greatest value to us today.In 1971 John Tysul Jones published a collection of articles about Williams.