William W. Mullins

William Wilson Mullins (March 5, 1927 – April 22, 2001) was an American physicist and materials scientist and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

His doctoral research, supervised by Cyril Stanley Smith, concerned the motion of grain boundaries in bismuth.

[2][3] He continued his work on metal grain boundaries in his first job, at the Westinghouse Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh, from 1955 until 1960.

[1] In 1960, he moved to the Carnegie Institute of Technology as an associate professor; his research there included work on surface scratching, crystal facetting, instabilities in shape formation of precipitates, and the effect of capillary forces on shape stability.

Later in his career, he branched out to other topics beyond material science, including the distribution of lunar craters and optical caustics caused by the diffraction of light through moving water.