William (Bill) Cochran FRS FRSE (30 July 1922 – 28 August 2003)[1] was a Scottish physicist.
[2][3] Bill Cochran was born in Scotland and educated at Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh.
He completed his PhD under Arnold Beevers in the Chemistry Department in X-ray crystallography of sucrose using isomorphous replacement.
With Francis Crick, he invented methods for deducing helical patterns from crystallographic data, which ultimately led to the solution of the structure of DNA.
Cochran's basic idea is that on cooling from a high temperature state, symmetry breaking can occur.