Sir Leslie Harold Martin, CBE, FAA, FRS (21 December 1900 – 1 February 1983) was an Australian physicist.

[1] His mathematics teacher, Miss Julia Flynn, encouraged him, and he won a Victorian Education Department Senior Government Scholarship in 1918.

[2] He entered the University of Melbourne on the scholarship in 1919, to study for a Bachelor of Science for Education, with the intention of becoming a maths teacher.

He earned extra money as a demonstrator in the Department of Natural Philosophy, and he lectured in the evenings at the Working Men's College.

Laby nominated him for an 1851 Research Fellowship and a free trip to England to study physics under Ernest Rutherford at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish laboratory.

[2] Before departing, he married Gladys Maude Elaine Bull, a Bachelor of Music student at the University of Melbourne, at St James's Church of England in Ivanhoe on 13 February 1923.

Martin enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, and continued his research into X-rays under Rutherford's supervision.

electrode holding a vacuum tube at arm's length in an attempt to increase the brilliance of the electrical display.

Cockcroft ultimately passed a spark to earth through a lump of meat, boring a hole half an inch in diameter.

[2] He won the David Syme Research Prize in 1934,[6] for his investigation of the Auger effect, the emission of electrons after ionisation by X-rays.

[1] Work with the chemical element xenon gave important confirmation of Paul Dirac's quantum field theory.

[8] In January 1942, he was seconded to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research's Radiophysics Laboratory in Sydney to develop secret valves for a Radio Direction Finder.

[9] The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research created the Atomic Physics Section in 1947 led by Martin.

That year, he was appointed a member of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, and was its deputy chairman when he retired in 1968.

In this time he oversaw a rapid expansion of Australian higher education, including the commencement of five new universities.

[14][15] In 1967 he became the chairman of the government's Tertiary Education (Services' Cadet Colleges) Committee that began planning for the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA).

[1] Martin retired in March 1971, stepping down as a director of IBM Australia Limited and as the chairman of the editorial council of Pergamon Press.

[16] The institute is interdisciplinary and has as its key objectives: In 1971 Duntroon established the Sir Leslie Martin Prize which has been awarded every year until 1985, and from then at ADFA since 1986.