Biography - Farid R. Ahmed (1924 - 2021)

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Farid Ahmed joined the Barnes [William H. Barnes] group in 1955 from England, where he had received his doctorate in Durward Cruickshank's lab [University of Leeds]. 

Barnes could foresee the important role that general-purpose digital computers could play in crystal structure determination and refinement, and encouraged Farid to develop suites of computer programs for the most advanced computers accessible to the group. Over the years, programs were written for the Ferranti FERUT, the IBM 650, IBM 1620, the IBM System 360, and the IBM 3090. Farid Ahmed remained a member of the original group until the groups in Pure Physics and Pure Chemistry merged in 1968, and eventually he was appointed head of the merged group.

–Carol P. Huber, https://www.iucr.org/news/newsletter/volume-17/number-4/crystallography-in-canada

Editor’s note: For more information about Ahmed’s work, see “For the Love of Computers in the 1950s”.