A PHYSICIST who helped develop a world-renowned personality test has died aged 91.

Peter Briggs Myers was the co-owner and developer of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), personality type assessment used across the globe.

Dr Myers, who died last month, was a Rhodes scholar who held a doctorate in nuclear physics from Oxford University.

In the 1990s he became a Murray Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford - one of only 10 to hold the honour.

Oxford-based OPP, one of Europe’s largest business psychology providers, is part of the Myers Briggs Company. Its old training centre was opened by Dr Myers around 25 years ago.

Dr Myers was born in the United States on April 24, 1926, to parents Clarence Gates Myers and Isabel Briggs Myers.

At the age of 16 he rescued Albert Einstein on Saranac Lake, New York.

Dr Myers was canoeing on the lake in 1942. The weather turned bad and he spotted a lone man in a small sailboat struggling to lower the sail.

The youngster paddled along side and helped to bring the sailboat safely to shore. He immediately recognized the lone sailor as Einstein, one of his heroes.

He enrolled in George Washington University, Washington DC, before enrolling in a Navy program for engineers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Dr Myers spent time on a Navy submarine before entering Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in September, earning his doctorate in nuclear physics from Oxford in 1950.

He married Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Monk on July 28, 1948, and began work as a physicist on transistors and semiconductor devices in New Jersey.

The couple later moved to California where Peter was employed by Magnavox Research Laboratories for more than ten years, working on radio and satellite navigation. They divorced in 1971.

Dr Myers soon married Katharine Downing Heisler, his high school sweetheart, and moved to the Washington area.

He joined the National Academy of Sciences as Bureau Director of Radioactive Waste Management, until retirement.

Dr Myers’s mother and grandmother, Katharine Cook Briggs, created the MBTI instrument as a practical application of the personality type theory of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, beginning their work in the 1940s.

When she died in 1980, she left the copyright to Dr Myers and his then wife, Katharine Downing Myers.

The couple spent decades overseeing the continued development of the assessment.

Today the MBTI instrument has been taken by millions of people around the world to help them better understand themselves.

The instrument has been translated into more than 25 languages.

Dr Myers, who bequeathed a substantial sum to Oxford University, is survived by a son, two daughters, three stepchildren, five grandchildren and one great grandchild.