Sir George Malcolm Brown, FRS[1] (5 October 1925 – 27 March 1997) was one of the most respected geologists of the second half of the twentieth century.
His formidable reputation as an igneous petrologist enabled him to become one of the few scientists invited by NASA to work on the Moon rock samples recovered from the Apollo 11 lunar mission.
Expeditions to Greenland to research the Skaergaard intrusion led Brown to a one-year Harkness Fellowship at Princeton University.
Like another Durham University geologist before him, Kingsley Dunham, Brown was appointed director of the Institute of Geological Sciences in 1979.
His early work with Lawrence Wager led to publication of Layered Igneous Rocks,[4] which even today remains an influential text.