William Hume-Rothery (15 May 1899 – 27 September 1968) was an English metallurgist and materials scientist who studied the constitution of alloys.
[4] His campaigning grandmother, Mary Hume-Rothery, was the daughter of Joseph Hume, a Scottish doctor and Radical Member of parliament.
[4] During World War II, he supervised numerous government contracts for work on aluminium and magnesium alloys.
[citation needed] After the war he returned to Oxford "to carry on research in intermetallic compounds and problems on the borderland of metallography and chemistry" and remained there for the rest of his working life.
In his research, he concluded that the microstructure of an alloy depends on the sizes of the component atoms, as well as the valency electron concentration, and electrochemical differences.