Person

Bracewell, Ronald Newbold (1921 - 2007)

AO

Born
22 July 1921
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Died
12 August 2007
Stanford, California, U.S.A.
Occupation
Electrical engineer and Radio astronomer

Summary

Ronald Bracewell worked in the CSIRO Radiophysics Laboratory during World War II and 1949-1954. He then moved to the United States of America, where he joined the Electrical Engineering faculty of Stanford University in 1955. Starting with his co-authorship with J. L. Pawsey of the first text on "Radio Astronomy" in 1955, Ron spent much of his time either contributing chapters to books or writing books, a number of which have been translated into other languages.His publications include The fourier Transform and its Applications (1965, 2nd ed. 1978).

Skip to

Details

Designed and developed microwave radar equipment, CSIRO Radiophysics Laboratory during World War II, Senior Research Officer 1949-54. Lecturer in radio astronomy, Berkeley Astronomy Department, University of California 1954-55, Electrical Engineering Faculty, Stanford University from 1955, Lewis M. Terman Professor and Fellow in Electrical Engineering from 1974. Duddell Premium, Institution of Electrical Engineers, London 1952.

Chronology

1941
Education - Bachelor of Science (BSc), University of Sydney
1943
Education - Bachelor of Engineering (BE), University of Sydney
1948
Education - Master of Engineering (ME), University of Sydney
1949
Education - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Cambridge
1949 - 1954
Career position - Senior Research Officer, Division of Radiophysics, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
1954 - 1955
Career position - Lecturer in radio astronomy, Berkeley Astronomy Department, University of California
1955 -
Career position - Electrical Engineering Faculty, Stanford University
1955
Publication - Book: "Radio Astronomy" with J. L. Pawsey
1974 - 1991
Career position - Lewis M. Terman Professor and Fellow in Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
1978
Award - Pollock Memorial Lecture, Royal Society of New South Wales
1991 -
Career position - Lewis M. Terman Professor Emeritus, Stanford University
1991
Life event - Retired
1994
Award - Heinrich Hertz Medal, IEEE - for his tomography work
8 Jun 1998
Award - Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) - for service to science in the fields of radio astronomy and image reconstruction

Colleague

Published resources

Books

  • Frater, Robert H.; Goss, Miller; and Wendt, Harry, Four pillars of radio astronomy: Mills, Christiansen, Wild and Bracewell (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 199 pp. Details
  • Pawsey, J. L.; Bracewell, R. N., Radio astronomy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 361 pp. Details
  • The Radiophysics Laboratory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, A Textbook of Radar (Sydney; London: Angus & Robertson, 1947), 579 pp. Author of Chapter 6. Details

Book Sections

  • Bracewell, R. N., 'Early work on imaging theory in radio astronomy' in The early years of radio astronomy: reflections fifty years after Jansky's discovery, Sullivan, W. T., ed. (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 167-90. Details

Journal Articles

  • Bracewell, Ronald N. and Bhathal. Ragbir, 'Professor Ronald Bracewell interviewed by Ragbir Bhathal', Journal and proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 151 (2) (2018), 181-208, https://search.informit.org/doi/epdf/10.3316/informit.184695715927865. Details
  • Thompson, A. Richard and Frater, Robert H., 'Ronald N. Bracewell: an Appreciation.', Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, 13 (2010), 172-8. Details

Resources

Resource Sections

See also

  • Goss, W. M.; Hooker, Claire; and Ekers, Ronald D., Joe Pawsey and the founding of Australian radio astronomy: early discoveries, from the sun to the cosmos (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2023), 1815 pp. Details

Gavan McCarthy; Ken McInnes

Created: 20 October 1993, Last modified: 20 October 2026

EOAS ID: biogs/P000251b.htm

This Edition: 2026 November - Keith Boardman (1926-2026) Memorial Edition
Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - Early summer: mid-November to late January
Reference: https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars/gariwerd-calendar#bom-anchor-list__item-ballambar-season-of-butterflies

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P000251b.htm

For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260