Sir John Currie Gunn CBE FRSE (13 September 1916 – 26 July 2002) was an influential Scottish mathematician and physicist.
He was part of a team of scientists and engineers led by Harrie Massey based first at Teddington, and then at the Admiralty Mining Establishment attached to HMS Vernon at Portsmouth.
In 1943, while still working at the Admiralty, Gunn was elected to a Research Fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, but after the war he chose instead to accept a Lectureship in Applied Mathematics at Manchester University.
There he worked with Professor Sydney Goldstein, a mathematician noted for his contribution to fluid dynamics, and wrote papers on supersonic flow and turbulence.
In 1946, Gunn became a lecturer in Professor Harrie Massey's department in University College London, where he carried out research in nuclear and particle physics.
Gunn then went to work at Glasgow University, where the Natural Philosophy Department, under its new chairman, Philip Dee, was branching out into nuclear physics.
With Professor Philip Dee, Gunn received funding for nuclear physics research, which allowed him and his colleagues to build a linear electron accelerator.
After Touschek moved to Rome, Italy, in 1953, Gunn collaborated with John Irving on the photodisintegration of light nuclei, which later became known as "Gunn-Irving wave functions".
It was during his period as chairman that the British government agreed to take part in the CERN project in Geneva, which proved critical to the development of European particle physics.
They had one son, Michael, born 1954, who became a theoretical physicist and a professor at Birmingham University,[1][2] a daughter-in-law, Nicola, and granddaughters, Eva and Lisa.