It is a sad duty to report the death of Hugo Rietveld at the age of 84 after a short illness.
He leaves behind his wife, a son and two daughters.
Hugo was born on the 7 March 1932 in The Hague and migrated to Western Australia with his family, where in 1957 he enrolled at the University of WA at the same time as Brian O’Connor and Syd Hall. He obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Ted Maslen who had studied under Dorothy Hodgkin at Oxford. Hugo pioneered single crystal neutron diffraction at Lucas Heights Sydney with Terry Sabine, and their first paper was published in Nature in 1961.
In a 1966 paper, Hugo already used intensities from overlapping Bragg peaks. It was the beginning of the Rietveld method! Scientists have started using the Rietveld method routinely since the early 90s, and the method has become more and more popular not only in the academic world.
We will always be indebted with Hugo for giving us a tool to unravel the secrets of matter.