Andrew Gray

Andrew Gray may refer to:

Andrew Gray (physicist)

Andrew Gray FRS FRSE (2 July 1847 – 10 October 1925) was a Scottish physicist and mathematician.

Born in Lochgelly, Fife, the son of John Gray, he was educated at Lochgelly School and studied at the University of Glasgow (MA 1876), where he was appointed the Eglinton Fellow in Mathematics in 1876. Perhaps more significantly, however, in 1875 he became the assistant and private secretary of Professor William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin). He held this post – an official University one after 1880 – until 1884, when he was appointed Professor of Physics at the newly founded University College of North Wales.

In June 1896 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society

He remained in Bangor until 1899, when he returned to Glasgow to become the Professor of Natural Philosophy, succeeding Kelvin on his retirement. He held this chair for twenty-four years, stepping down in 1923, shortly before his death.

Publications

His major scientific publications included works on electromagnetism,dynamics and Bessel functions. He also wrote a treatise on gyrostats.

Andrew Gray (anthropologist)

Andrew Gray (21 July 1955 in Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom – 7 May 1999, near Vanuatu) was a British anthropologist and activist for the rights of indigenous peoples.

Gray graduated from Edinburgh University in 1973 and received a PhD from the University of Oxford in 1983 for his work studying the Arakmbut people of the Peruvian Amazon.

He then became director of the International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs, a post he held for six years. After leaving the IWGIA in 1989, he continued to act as a consultant for them and for related organisations such as the World Rainforest Movement, the International Alliance of Indigenous and Tribal Forest Peoples, the Gaia Foundation and Anti-Slavery International.

Although he lectured at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Oxford, Gray avoided a conventional academic career and never took up a full-time research post. He continued to publish academic work, most notably The Arakmbut of Amazonian Peru (three vols, 1996–1997). He also spent a large amount of time on fieldwork, visiting and talking to indigenous groups worldwide.