George Bekefi

George Bekefi (14 March 1925, Prague – 17 August 1995, Brookline, Massachusetts) was a plasma physicist, a professor at MIT, and an inventor.[1][2]

In 1939 Bekefi emigrated from Czechoslovakia to England by means of a British government program to help Jewish children. He received in 1948 a B.S. in science and mathematics from University College London. In 1948 he went to Montreal as an instructor in the physics department of McGill University, where he earned an M.S. in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1952. At McGill he became a research associate and then an assistant professor, leaving in 1957 to join MIT's Plasma Physics Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Bekefi remained at MIT for the remainder of his career. In MIT's physics department he became in 1961 an assistant professor, in 1964 an associate professor, and in 1967 a full professor, retiring in the summer of 1995 as professor emeritus.[1]

In 1976, he and a staff researcher, Dr. Thaddeus Orzechowski, developed a source of radiation producing bursts of microwaves about 50 times as strong as the largest microwave generators then in use. More recently, he worked to develop free-electron lasers as power sources in high-frequency bands. Such lasers have wide applications in communications, bulk chemical processing and fusion experiments, as well as cutting, drilling and welding. He received seven patents, wrote more than 180 scientific papers and was the co-author of three books.[3]

(NOTE: The preceding quotation from the New York Times obituary should have "author or co-author" instead of "co-author" because Bekefi was the sole author of Radiation Processes in Plasmas.)

Bekefi guided about 50 graduate students to their M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. Upon his death from leukemia, he was survived by a wife, a son, and a daughter.[1]

Awards and honors

Selected publications

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Professor emeritus George Bekefi dies at 70". Massachusetts Institute of Technology News. August 30, 1995.
  2. Patents by Inventor George Bekefi, Justia Patents Database
  3. "George Bekefi, 70, Physics Researcher". NY Times. 22 August 1995.
  4. Sturrock, P. A. (October 1967). "Review: Radiation Processes in Plasmas by George Bekefi". Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. 79 (470): 514–516. JSTOR 40674522.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/10/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.