Williams received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1955 and on Martin Summerfield's advise, he moved to California Institute of Technology to pursue his PhD, graduating it in 1958 under the supervision of Sol Penner, with Richard Feynman on the thesis committee. He presented his PhD thesis to von Kármán at his home, who had influenced Williams greatly.
Career
After finishing his PhD, Williams worked in the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics at Harvard University until 1964, after which he joined the faculty at UCSD. He was the fourth faculty member to be appointed, when Sol Penner founded the Engineering department in University of California, San Diego. In January 1981, he accepted the Robert H. Goddard chair at Princeton, eventually returning to UCSD in 1988. Williams also served as an adjunct Professor at Yale University for one month of each year starting in 1997 and culminating after ten years. He was also the director of Center for Energy Research from 1990 to 2006 at UCSD. He served as a department chair at UCSD for four years.
Research
Williams' research interests includes combustion, propulsion applications, micro-gravity flames etc. He made seminal contributions to the combustion field for the past six decades and considered as one of the prominent scientist in combustion. He wrote the Williams spray equation in 1958 when he was still a PhD student, as a statistical model for spray combustion analogous to Boltzmann equation. Though Activation Energy Asymptotics were known to Russian scientists forty years ago, it was Williams call in 1971 in Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics which made the western scientific community to start using the analysis. He wrote down the G equation in 1985, a model for premixed turbulent flame as a wrinkled flame. The classification of Combustion instabilities was first introduced by Williams and Barrère in 1969. He worked on number of projects with NASA, Air force and other organizations. He is the principal investigator of the following International Space Station experiments, MDCA, FSDC, FSDC-2, DCE, FLEX, FLEX-2, Cool Flames Investigation. He conducted lot of experiments, some of his recent experiments include spiral flames in von Kármán swirling flow, ethanol flames, fire spread etc.
Publications
Williams Combustion Theory, second edition published in 1985, is still an authoritative book in the combustion field.
A conference titled Symposium on Advancements in Combustion Theory was conducted at UCSD in 2004 in honor of Williams 70th birthday. Combustion Science and Technology released a special issue in honor of Williams 80th birthday.
