A few words about Alexander F Wells

As we often refer to the work of Alexander F. Wells in this book, we thought it appropriate to make a small digression from our main subject and write a few words about him. Neither of us had the opportunity to meet him, he belonged to a different generation of scientists, but we have, as many others, been amazed at his ability to analyse 3D-structures, and 3D-nets in particular, and this at a time when the tools were mainly paper, pencil and model building. 

The following sketch is based on a recent biographical article by Wells colleague at the university of Connecticut, John Tanaka [31], 

He crossed over the Atlantic and once again into academic research, first as a NSF Visiting Scientist and later as a professor of chemistry (1968-1980) at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. He moved back to England (where his four children lived) in 1986 and published his last research paper Relations between dense sphere packings with B. L. Chamberland, in 1987 [34]. He died in 1994 at the age of 82. His scientific legacy includes 70 research papers, most of them with himself as a single author, five books, [7,8,29,33,35] and some 200 3D-models of inorganic structures and networks still in use at the University of Connecticut. 

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