Cyril Domb

Cyril Domb was born in 1920 in London

Domb was born on 9 December 1920 in North London to a Hasidic Jewish family. His father Yoel came from Warsaw and his mother Sarah from Oświęcim, Poland. He studied classical Jewish texts with tutors and attended Torah classes given by Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler.

He won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, and graduated in mathematics in 1941. During World War II he worked on radar at the Admiralty Signal Establishment in Portsmouth, where his group found a way to measure the height of an object. He earned his PhD at Cambridge in 1949 under Fred Hoyle.

Domb lectured in mathematics at Cambridge from 1952 to 1954 and was professor of theoretical physics at King's College London from 1954 to 1981. In 1972 he began co-editing the series Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena, which reached 20 volumes. He also helped found the British Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists and wrote on science and Judaism, corresponding with the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

In 1981 he moved to Israel and settled in Bayit Vegan, Jerusalem. He was professor of physics at Bar-Ilan University from 1981 to 1989 and served as academic president of the Jerusalem College of Technology. He married Shirley Galinsky in 1957, and they had 6 children. He died on 15 February 2012.