Sir Robert William Kerr Honeycombe, FREng, FRS,(2 May 1921 - 14 September 2007)[1] was a former Goldsmiths' Professor of Metallurgy and Professor Emeritus of the University of Cambridge. He was an Honorary Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
He was born in Melbourne, Australia.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in March, 1981 and served on the council. His application citation read: "Established an international reputation in physical metallurgy recognised by the award of the Rosenheim Medal (Institute of Metals 1959), Beilby Medal (Soc. Chem. Ind. - Institute of Metals 1963), St. Claire Deville Medal (Societe Francaise de Metallurgie 1971), R.F. Mehl Medal (Am. Inst. Mining and Met. Engineers 1976). He has made many distinguished and original contributions to a variety of important topics in some 120 papers from early work with Boas, which established the role of anisotropic thermal expansion in deforming non cubic metals by thermal cycling, to single crystal studies which revealed how solute atoms and dispersed phases changed basic deformation behaviour. Studies of complex microstructures of alloy steels showed how carbide dispersions nucleate and grow during tempering and achieve high strengths. Recent work has directly used the gamma/alpha transformation in steels to produce ultra fine carbide dispersions by a previously unknown interfacial mechanism which is a major factor in the design of strong, dilute, alloy, steels ("micro-alloyed")" [2]
He was knighted in 1990.