Sir William Lawrence Bragg CH OBE MC FRS was an Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer of the Bragg law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure. He was joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915: "For their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-ray" an important step in the development of X-ray crystallography. He was knighted in 1941. To date, Lawrence Bragg is the youngest Nobel Laureate, having received the award at the age of 25. He was the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, when the epochal discovery of the structure of DNA was reported by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in February 1953.
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