Ronald Newbold Bracewell

Ronald N. Bracewell was a physicist and electrical engineer who made significant contributions to the fields of radio astronomy, microwave engineering, and medical imaging. He was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1921, and graduated from the University of Sydney with degrees in mathematics, physics, and engineering. During World War II, he worked at the Radiophysics Laboratory of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), where he designed and developed microwave radar equipment. He received his PhD in physics from Cambridge University in 1949, where he studied ionospheric research under J. A. Ratcliffe. He then returned to CSIRO as a senior research officer, where he was involved in very-long-wave propagation and radio astronomy. He discovered the first radio source outside the solar system, which turned out to be the Crab Nebula. He also developed the theory of Fourier synthesis for radio telescopes, which allowed the construction of large arrays of small antennas that could produce high-resolution images of the sky. In 1955, he joined the Electrical Engineering faculty at Stanford University, where he became the Lewis M. Terman Professor in 1974. He founded the Space, Telecommunications and Radioscience Laboratory (STAR Lab), where he conducted research on solar radio emissions, interplanetary scintillation, antenna theory, and image reconstruction. He invented the Bracewell transform, a variant of the Fourier transform that is useful for processing circular data. He also proposed the concept of Bracewell probes, hypothetical self-replicating spacecraft that could explore the galaxy. He applied his expertise in image processing to medical imaging, and developed algorithms for computerized tomography (CT) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). He was a pioneer in using these techniques to study the human brain and its functions. He received numerous awards and honors for his achievements, including the Duddell Premium of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1952, the Heinrich Hertz Medal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1994, and the Grote Reber Medal of the International Union of Radio Science in 2002. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975, the National Academy of Engineering in 1976, and the Institute of Medicine in 1992. He was also a Fellow of several scientific societies, such as the Royal Astronomical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the IEEE. He wrote several books and articles on scientific and non-scientific subjects, such as radio astronomy, Fourier analysis, medical imaging, evolution, philosophy, history, and trees. He was an avid tree enthusiast and published a book on Trees of Stanford and Environs in 2005. He died of heart failure at his home in Stanford in 2007.