William Allen Miller FRS (December 17 1817 – September 30 1870) was a British scientist who taught at King's College London, succeeding to the position held by John Frederic Daniell. Although primarily a chemist, the scientific contributions for which Miller is mainly remembered today are in spectroscopy and astrochemistry, new fields in his time. Miller won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1867 jointly with William Huggins, for their spectroscopic study of the composition of stars. In 1845, Miller was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. According to his obituary (see below), Miller married Eliza Forrest of Birmingham in 1842. He died in 1870, a year after his wife, and they are both buried in the "cemetery at Norwood." They were survived by a son and two daughters. The Miller crater on the Moon is named after him.
References
- Obituary - Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 1871, volume 19, pages xix-xxvi
- "William Allen Miller and William Hallowes Miller (A Note to the Early History of Spectroscopy)" by C. W. Adams in Isis, 1943, volume 34, pages 337-339.
- Introduction to the Study of Inorganic Chemistry by W. A. Miller (1871) - Scanned at Google books
