Fifty Years of X-ray Diffraction, edited by Paul Peter Ewald Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-11-05
Edited by Paul Peter Ewald, credited as P. P. Ewald; the volume contains contributions by multiple authors. Published for the International Union of Crystallography in 1962 by N.V.A. Oosthoek’s Uitgeversmaatschappij, Utrecht. The International Union of Crystallography hosts the 1999 digitization; neither editorial credit nor institutional issuance is whole-book authorship.
Paul Peter Ewald Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-11-05
Paul Peter Ewald developed a method for calculating long-range electrostatic lattice potentials. Ewald summation separates the interaction into rapidly converging real-space and reciprocal-space contributions through a Gaussian splitting. The artificial splitting parameter changes the work assigned to each sum, while the complete physical result is unchanged when electric charge and boundary conventions are fixed. This makes lattice electrostatics computationally tractable without simply discarding distant electric charges, and connects crystal calculations with Fourier methods.[ref]
A physicist who worked on crystallography and edited a participant-rich history of X-ray diffraction. The volume places experimental photographs, early theoretical arguments and personal recollections together, making it possible to trace how diffraction patterns became evidence for atomic arrangements in crystals. Its individual contributions have separate authors, while Ewald supplied the editorial framework.[ref]