Luis Walter Alvarez (1911-1988)

Sketch : W Grey Walter 1 Walter

Nobel-winning Sir Winston Churchill in his history of the Second World War wrote a chapter on the "wizards" who had helped Britain win the war in the air by the development and use of radar. William Grey Walter (1910-1977) was one of those young wizards. He used his experience to design and construct a life-like robot with a nonlinear dynamic brain, which offered an existence proof that brains ...

Walter Salisbury

Mr. Walter Salisbury died suddenly at Northampton on "th January, 1935, at the age of forty-six. He had been suffering from pneumonia following influenza. He entered the Bristol Medical School in 1906, and was a student at the -ftoyal Infirmary, winning the Tibbits Prize for Surgery. He qualified M.B., B.S. London, in 1913, and held the offices ?f House Surgeon and Casualty Officer at the Royal...

Maclyn McCarty (1911–2005)

The editorial board lost a real soul mate when Maclyn McCarty passed away on January 2nd at age 93. While attending the theater with friends, one of the many activities that he enjoyed, he collapsed. “Dr. Mac” was revered worldwide for his remarkable experiments that led to the identification of DNA as the genetic material. This totally unanticipated discovery, and the revolutionary 1944 paper ...

Simon Flexner, 1911

The Alvarez and Lohmann refractive lenses revisited.

Alvarez and Lohmann lenses are variable focus optical devices based on lateral shifts of two lenses with cubic-type surfaces. I analyzed the optical performance of these types of lenses computing the first order optical properties (applying wavefront refraction and propagation) without the restriction of the thin lens approximation, and the spot diagram using a ray tracing algorithm. I proposed...