This is very sad indeed. I met Bracewell and talked to him several times. When Maureen Quirk figured out she could not get some FFT stuff through my thick head, she gave me Bracewell's book and it opened up the world to me. I had never heard of a Hartley transform or a cosine transform and I had great new toys to work with. I made it a point to get acquainted with him after this and thank him. You can bet that almost everyone who has ever worked on the MPEG video compression techniques learned most of the Discrete Cosine Transform theory from Bracewell.

RIP Bob

Tom Clark, K3IO wrote:

Many of you know of Ron Bracewell, the Australian Radio Astronomer. I have just learned of his passing at age 86; details can be read at http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/2007/pr-bracewell-082207.html. Ron's profession credentials at Stanford are summarized on his personal web page at http://www-star.stanford.edu/people/bracewell.html

I met Ron as a young radio astronomer in the early 1960's, shortly after he came to the US. He taught me about the beauty of the Fourier Transform, and I have been forever in his debt since that first encounter.Many of you have heard me refer to his McGraw-Hill textbook, "/The Fourier Transform and its Applications/" (ISBN-13:978-0070070158, see this entry on Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Fourier-Transform-Its-Applications/dp/0070070156)as THE bible to be learned and revered by anyone thinking about topics like antenna arrays, image processing, holography, XRAY & MRI tomography, and ... that share the Fourier Transform as their foundation.

Ron also was active in philosophical discussions about SETI (see, for example http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/B/BracewellR.html); be sure to read his 1975 book /The Galactic Club/.

Rest well, Ron. Your genius profoundly affected many lives!

Tom Clark //