Simon Ramo

Simon Ramo (born May 7, 1913 in Salt Lake City , Utah , † June 27, 2016 in Santa Monica , California ) was an American physicist , engineer and entrepreneur . He is considered the father of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in the US.

Life

Ramo studied electrical engineering from 1929 at the University of Utah with a bachelor's degree in 1933 and received his doctorate in both electrical engineering and physics from Caltech in 1936 . He then went into research at General Electric , where he worked in microwave technology and electron microscopy . He became a leading engineer in microwave technology and had around 25 patents before his 30th birthday . In 1946 he joined Hughes Aircraft as Research Director and Vice President . Since there were increasing management problems with Howard Hughes (which the main customer, the US Air Force , complained), he left Hughes Aircraft with Dean Wooldridge (1913-2006) in 1953 and founded the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation. From 1954 to 1958 he successfully headed the scientific part of the ICBM program in the USA. When Ramo-Wooldridge merged with Thompson Products to form Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge (from 1965 TRW Inc. ) in 1958 , he became Vice President there. In 1964, Martin Marietta formed the Bunko-Ramo Corporation with TRW, with Ramo as president.

In 2008 he became Professor ( Presidential Chair ) at the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California . He wrote numerous books, from microwave technology to management to tennis.

Ramo was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1964), the American Philosophical Society , the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Engineering (which he co-founded) and was a Fellow of American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). In 1979 he received the National Medal of Science and in 1983 the Presidential Medal of Freedom .

Ramo was married with two sons and lived in Beverly Hills. The IEEE awards a Simon Ramo Medal .

Fonts

• Introduction to Microwaves. McGraw Hill, 1945.
• Fields and Waves on Modern Radio. Wiley, 1944; 2nd Edition. with John Whinnery, 1953.
• Editor with Allen Puckett: Guided missile engineering. McGraw Hill, 1959.
• Editor: Peacetime uses of outer space. McGraw Hill, 1961.
• The management of innovative technological corporations. Wiley, 1980.
• The management of innovative technological corporations. McGraw Hill, 1983.
• The Business of Science: Winning and Losing in the High-Tech Age. Hill & Wang Pub, 1988.
• Cure for chaos; fresh solutions to social problems through the systems approach. McKay, 1969.
• America's technology slip. Wiley, 1980.
• Century of Mismatch. McKay, New York 1970.
• Extraordinary tennis for the ordinary player. 2nd Edition. New York 1977.
• Tennis by Machiavelli. New York 1984.
• with John R. Whinnery, Theodore Van Duzer: Fields and waves in communication electronics. 3. Edition. Wiley, 1994.
• Let the robots do the dying. Figueroa Press, Los Angeles 2011.
• To wit. Figueroa Press, Los Angeles 2011.
• Tales from the top. Figueroa Press, Los Angeles 2011.
• Meetings, meetings and more meetings. Getting things done when people are involved. Bonus Books, Los Angeles 2005.
• with Ronald Sugar: Strategic business forecasting. A structured approach to shaping the future of your business. McGraw Hill, 2009.

Web links

• Biography at Incose

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Simon Ramo dies at 103; TRW co-founder shaped California aerospace
2. ↑ Appointment at USC
3. ↑ Simon Ramo Medal