Rudolph George Herman Prince
Rudolph George Herman Prince was born in Germany in 1928. His father was a Prussian who served in both World Wars. His mother was north German Jewish, which is why he left Germany with her. His grandfather was engineer with Siemen Shukard, who had been living in Florence since 1933 so in 1936 Rudolph, his sister and their mother, went to live with in Florence. He went to school in Santo Domenico monastery, with its fascist influences.
1938 they decided to move because of this threat and chose to go New Zealand, but had to wait too long to be accepted, but group of Quakers in Northern Ireland in 1939 got them visas to that County and.so stayed a year until they got the New Zealand visa. He had to go to an Irish prep school and learn in English. In holidays, he stayed in Belfast with a doctor.
In May 1949, the family got a ship, which went through the English Channel to sail to New Zealand with no escort or convoy, through the Panama Canal to New Zealand, his first real home. He was very grateful to New Zealand for accepting him. He attended Christchurch Boys High School, and obtained a scholarship to Canterbury University where he studied chemical engineering in the department which had been set up by Stan Sieman in 1944.
His university education seems to have been a very rich one as he was involved in drama, stage managing, and lighting with Ngaio Marsh, later to be a famous novelist. Canterbury University had Karl Popper, the philosopher on the staff, and he was a great and wonderful influence, an enormous influence on the young people. Prince particularly remembered a lecture by Popper talking about the influence of the atomic bomb which had been dropped on Hiroshima.
After the war Prince’s did not reconcile and went their own ways. Rudolph did eventually meet his father after the war. Upon graduation from Canterbury University in 1950 he was offered a scholarship to do a Ph D in Australia at the University of New South Wales, though this meant leaving the young woman whom he was proposing to marry in New Zealand. He graduated with this degree in 1957, though he spent some of the early 1950s in the UK at Newcastle-on-Tyne working in the research department at Epsom for three years.
In 1958 he returned to New Zealand and Canterbury University to undertake research for two years until he returned to Australia as Senior Lecturer in Chemical Engineering at the University of Sydney until 1964.
In 1965 he moved north to Queensland to become the Foundation Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Queensland, a position he held until 1969. At this time he again returned to Sydney as Professor of Chemical Engineering and Head of the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Sydney. He held this position for the rest of his working life until 1992.
Prince was an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia and received the Peter Nicol Russell Medal from the Institution in 1992. Rudolph George Herman Prince was made an Officer of the Order of Australia on Australia Day 1998. For service to the discipline of chemical engineering, both academically and professionally, to tertiary education and to the community.
He also had a long and active involvement with Rotary.
Rudolph Prince died on 3 July 2017.
To read the University of Sydney's obituary for Professor Prince use this link:
To access an oral history interview with Rudolph George Herman Prince please use this link:'
https://heritage.engineersaustralia.org.au/wiki/Oral_Histories_Sydney
