J(ock) D Eshelby
In the July 1999 MRS Bulletin, Alex King wrote for a column called "Posterminaries" - a one page article titled "Lessons from J.D. Eshelby". I became a fan of Alex King and the posterminaries column on reading the article, and even before I read the column, I was a fan of Eshelby (thanks to the formative influence of Abi - He would not allow any mention to Eshelby's paper without the word "classic" preceding it).
The article by Alex King is very informative - for example, it tells you the meaning of the word "Jock" - a name by which Eshelby was known among his friends. There are two stories narrated in the article. One was about the incident that led to Eshelby being a "pure theoretician". Hunt down the article and read about it - It is well worth the effort. The second one was is about Eshelby's election to the Royal Society. It is such a wonderful story, I can not resist the temptation of retelling it here:
Eshelby, it seems, was sore that he was not elevated to the rank of Fellow of the Royal Society. So, in one lecture, he described all of the then current theories on a particular topic and what was wrong with each of them, and then wrote the names of the authors of each one of them, and, finally wrote "FRS" after each of the names. Apparently, he was elected an FRS that year and never repeated the performance.