Ronald N. Bracewell
Ronald Newbold Bracewell (born July 22, 1921 in Sydney , † August 12, 2007 in Stanford ) was an Australian electrical engineer , mathematician , physicist and radio astronomer. He was a professor at Stanford University .
Life
Bracewell studied physics and mathematics at the University of Sydney with a bachelor's degree in 1941, a bachelor's degree in engineering in 1943 and a master's degree in 1948. During World War II, he worked in radar research from 1942 to 1946. From 1946 to 1950 he was at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in ionospheric research and received his doctorate in physics there in 1949 with JA Ratcliffe. From 1949 to 1954 he worked in the laboratory for radio physics of the Australian research organization CSIRO in Sydney and worked on radio astronomy, among other things. 1954/55 he was Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of California and from 1955 until his retirement in 1991 professor at Stanford. Most recently he was Lewis M. Terman Professor of Electrical Engineering and was also scientifically active after his retirement in 1979 until his death. In 1987 he was visiting scholar at Oxford and in 1988 at Cambridge.
In addition to his work as a radio astronomer (about which he published the first textbook in 1955 with Joseph L. Pawsey ), he also used image reconstruction methods for computer tomography. He dealt with the possibility of extraterrestrial life and the possibility of communication with extraterrestrial civilizations via Bracewell probes and published books on Fourier transform and other mathematical methods in image processing.
In 1994 he received the Heinrich Hertz Medal from the IEEE . He was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (1950), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1989) and in 1992 he became an external member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences . In 1998 he became Officer of the Order of Australia . In 2002 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Bracewell had been married since 1953 and had a son and a daughter. He was an amateur botanist and wrote a book on the trees in the Stanford area.
Fonts
- with JL Pawsey: Radio Astronomy, Oxford 1955
- The Fourier Transform and its applications, McGraw Hill 1965, 2nd edition 1978
- Radio astronomy techniques, in Siegfried Flügge (Ed.) Handbuch der Physik , Volume 54, 1962
- The Galactic Club: Intelligent Life in Outer Space, Stanford 1974
- The Hartley Transform , Oxford University Press 1986
- Two Dimensional Imaging, Prentice-Hall 1995
- Fourier Analysis and Imaging, Plenary 2004
- Trees of Stanford and Environs, Stanford Historical Society 2005
Web links
- Publications by RN Bracewell in the Astrophysics Data System
- Obituaries for RN Bracewell in the Astrophysics Data System
- Michael Pena, obituary in Stanford News
Individual evidence
- ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bracewell, Ronald N. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bracewell, Ronald Newbold (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Australian electrical engineer, physicist and radio astronomer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 22, 1921 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Sydney |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 12, 2007 |
| Place of death | Stanford |