David Shoenberg was the fourth of five children of Sir Isaac Shoenberg, engineer and pioneer of radio and television, and Esther (née Aisenstein).^[4] He was born in St. Petersburg, but came to England with the family when he was three. He attended Latymer Upper School, from where he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge and went up in October 1929. He had intended to study mathematics, but after one year he switched to physics, gaining a First in Part II^{[clarification needed]} in 1932. This ensured that he could continue as a research student, working on low-temperature physics in the newly-built Mond Laboratory,^[5] and supervised by Peter Kapitza, FRS.^[3][4]

In August 1934 Kapitza went to a conference in Moscow, and to visit his parents, but was not permitted to leave. He left Shoenberg more or less on his own. When the half-built helium liquefier was finished, Shoenberg chose the two topics which lasted him to the end of his active life, superconductivity and the De Haas-Van Alphen effect (dHvA).^[6]

Back in Moscow a new Laboratory had been built for Kapitza, to which Shoenberg was invited in 1937. He spent a year there, continuing work on, and making considerable advances in the understanding of dHvA.^[7]

During the World War II Shoenberg worked on mine-detection and delayed-action fuses (for which he was appointed MBE in 1944^[8]).^[4]

For most of his career Schoenberg made the dHvA effect into a powerful tool for understanding the behaviour of conduction electrons in metals.^[1] A tribute to Shoenberg’s work and contributions was published by V M Pudalov of the Lebedev Physical Institute in 2011.^[9]

Family edit

In Cambridge, in March 1940, David Shoenberg married Catherine (Kate) Félicité Fischmann, who was some five years older. Her ancestry was Russian but she was born a Belgian, and had taken British nationality before her marriage. She was a physiology graduate of University College London and worked in Cambridge on tissue culture, at the Strangeways Research Laboratory and elsewhere. The Shoenbergs had two daughters, Ann and Jane, and a son Peter.

Kate died in Cambridge in 2003, age 97. David died in Addenbrooke's Hospital on 10 March 2004, following a stroke, and was cremated in Cambridge on the 18th .^[4]

• 1944 MBE
• 1944-1952 University Lecturer in Physics, Cambridge University
• 1947-1973 Head of the Royal Society Mond Laboratory
• 1947-1973 Corporate Official Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
• 1952-1973 Reader in Physics
• 1953 FRS
• 1964 Fritz London Memorial Prize
• 1973-1978 Professor of Physics (Emeritus)
• 1973-1978 Head of the Low Temperature Physics Group, Cavendish Laboratory
• 1973-2004 Life Fellow
• 1982 International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences^[10]
• 1995 Hughes Medal