Archibald Vivian Hill

Born Sept. 26, 1886, in Bristol, England. British physiologist. Fellow of the Royal Society of London (1918; secretary, 1935–45).

Hill graduated from Cambridge University in 1907. From 1914 to 1919 he taught physical chemistry at Cambridge University and physiology at the University of Manchester. He was a professor of physiology at the University of Manchester from 1920 to 1923 and at University College in London from 1923 to 1925. In 1946 he joined the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (president, from 1963).

Hill’s principal works are devoted to the thermodynamics of muscular activity and the mechanism of muscle contraction. He improved the thermoelectric method of measuring the temperature in muscles and designed several precise instruments to study heat production in nerves and muscles. He introduced the concepts of oxygen debt and steady state to characterize the relationship between oxygen consumption and the removal of decomposition products in muscles. Hill shared a Nobel Prize in 1922 with O. Meyerhof.